Category Archives: Holidays

Holidays and holiday traditions

Canadian Victoria Day Celebration

Nationality: Canada/USA
Age: 49
Occupation: Barre Instructor
Residence: Seattle
Performance Date: 4/2/22
Primary Language: English

Context:

AS now lives in Seattle, but grew up in Blenheim, Ontario in Canada and remembers how people celebrated Victoria Day every May.

Main Piece:

“Our holiday in May is called Victoria Day instead of Memorial Day, and it’s very widely known as the May 2-4 Weekend because cases of beer come with 24, and it’s typically around the 24th of May. So it’s May 2-4 Weekend, everybody loses their minds, it’s generally warm enough that you can go camping. There’s tons of underage drinking which is saying something because the drinking age is pretty young in Canada anyway.”

Analysis:

This holiday tradition seems to parallel many American traditions as well. Holidays that are not associated largely with spending time with family tend to instead turn to drinking and partying instead. While Victoria Day is an institutionally enforced holiday, the extrapolation into the full May 2-4 Weekend and the subsequent packaging of 24-beer cases seems to have arisen from the folk. It is apt that a holiday weekend in May would generate such interest in Canada since Canada is a very cold country for the winter season and, like AS mentioned, May is when the weather starts heating up again. It seems like it goes hand in hand with other festivals of springtime, celebrating the end of the winter.

Songpyeon

Background:

Informant is a half-white, half-Korean student studying at USC who has lived in America their whole life.

“I feel like it’s not a tradition, just a holiday, on 추석 (Chuseok), which is like the Korean Thanksgiving, you eat like, rice cake also. You eat this like little, there’s like little colorful ones, I think they’re called 송편 (songpyeon, lit. “pine cake”), and they have little things in it, they go bad really fast.”

Context:

This conversation was recorded in-person. We were discussing holidays that we celebrated that had traditional foods usually eaten on said holiday.

Analysis:

Food is a major component of ethnic identity. As Elliot Oring notes in his book, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, “it is unlikely that anyone who feels some stirrings of identification with an ethnic group cannot think of some dish recipe, or kind of meal that they particularly associate with their group” (35). Songpyeon is seen as quintessential to Chuseok, as it also carries symbolic belief, to show gratitude to the year’s harvest. Songpyeon is a type of dish made from rice, which is a staple crop in Korean food (there are also many other dishes that involve rice—tteok is a whole classification of various rice cakes). Making songpyeon invariably leads to a large quantity made, it is reasonable for it to be served on a holiday like Chuseok, traditionally celebrated with the entire family. As folklore, food serves as a symbol of in-group identification, creating a sense of community. Especially with members of a diaspora, food is also a way to stay connected with their culture that they otherwise would not be exposed to.

Coin cake.

N is a 55-year-old female Canadian immigrant originally from Vancouver, Canada. N is a retired social worker currently living in Phoenix, Arizona.

While visiting my home state of Phoenix, Arizona, I visited N’s home, as she is my neighbor. During the visit, I asked N if she had any folklore she would be willing to share with me, and she offered me the following piece of folklore.

N: I’m talking about a tradition we had in Canada growing up, so we’re talking about the mid-sixties, uh, through the mid-seventies through approximately the age of ten, so. Um.. what we experienced growing up is that um.. When celebrating birthdays it was very common for various denominations of coins to be baked into birthday cake. And the idea was I guess for the.. child is it was a little bit of an extra gift, and surprise. But of course all of the other kids would be getting a piece of the cake as well, and so there was this fun little challenge as to who would be getting, uh, the higher coin, uh, it seems silly now seems how were just talking about coins. But at the time, um, we just thought it was a fun thing, and, I don’t think anyone thought about the potential of choking, but that is something that was very common and I have since learned that that was a tradition from Europe and possibly actually originating from Greece. Just a sign of good luck and, um, good blessings for the coming year. Uh, if I recall correctly I don’t believe I remember any adults having birthdays with these special cakes, but it was super common and it was really a fun thing that kinda went away unfortunately when we got older. I would love to actually… why don’t we uh, in my next birthday cake that I bake, uh, I should impose this uh, tradition to be new.

Reflection: I can relate to N’s story to a certain degree, as my elementary school used to hold annual Marti Gras celebrations in which they would bake cakes with items hidden in them. Except for coins, however, the cakes would each have a small plastic baby inside. Just as in M’s account, whoever found the special item inside the cake would receive good luck. With this in mind, it is interesting to consider how the American and Canadian traditions differ, in that the American Marti Gras cakes I am familiar with contain objects of perceived value while M’s Canadian birthday cakes contain items of actual value. As a result, the American cake tradition appears to be centered on an intangible sense of accomplishment (luck) while the Canadian cake tradition appears to be centered around monetary gain. This makes sense in relation to N’s assertion that coin cakes were exclusive to children’s birthday cakes, as children are probably more willing to discover a prize in their cake that they can actually use rather than an abstract concept like luck.

Chitlins & Sals in Southern Food

Main Piece:

Me: So, what are these foods that you’re describing?

DH: Uhm… Sals is leftover pig parts— I don’t know what parts specifically. Uhm, it’s good… Chitlins is really more of a Southern delicacy now, but it used to be… I’m pretty sure that’s just pig intestines and all that, right?

Me: I believe so. Yeah.

DH: So, the reason that black people eat that is, you know, back in slavery, the owner would give you whatever they had left… You gotta eat something… I’ve never eaten chitlins, but…

Me: Have you had family members who have eaten it?

DH: My dad. Uhm, mostly every family gathering—you know like Christmas, Thanksgiving—they’re gonna have that at somebody’s house.

Me: … It’s interesting too, because I’m pretty sure my mom eats chitlins as well and so does my dad, occasionally.

DH: It’s really more of like a Southern thing.

Me: It’s interesting how it’s evolved in that way.

Context:

This was performed over FaceTime with one of my best friends from high school, who is African-American. She lives in Brandon, Mississippi, a small town right next to the state capital of Jackson and is a freshman studying Communications at Copiah-Lincoln Community College.

Analysis:

As my friend said, this most likely derives from Slavery Era practices in the American South. When slave masters were finished with their meals, they would give the scraps to their slaves. This included all the undesirable parts of a pig, and so this adaptation to ‘eating anything’ and making the most out of a bad situation was most likely necessary for survival. It was probably passed down through generations and developed as a cultural delicacy amongst black southerners. This is evidence to how people take traumatic experiences from their collective histories and evolve it into a way of embracing one’s past and culture. It has now developed more as a general Southern delicacy, right along the line with gizzards. Food that is so rich in history like this, that was once used as a way of division, is now being used as a point of connection amongst communities.

See more on ‘Ethnic Folklore’ below:

Oring, Elliott. “Ethnic Groups and Ethnic Folklore.” In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, edited by E. Oring, 23-44.Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986.

Palabok, New Year’s, and Circular Shapes

On New Year’s Eve, I always cook palabok… it’s a, it’s a rice noodle dish with shrimp stock and pork… but the most important part is the stuffs you put on the top.  You know how I always have you arrange everything in a circle, right? Have you ever noticed that even the toppings are circles?  So I put the noodles in a circular serving platter, and we have the slices of hard boiled egg, the chopped green onions, the boiled shrimp, squid rings, the calamansi halves.  All of that is supposed to be circular to invite wealth and abundance in the coming year.  Di ako sure kung talagang Pilipino yung tradition na ‘yun… (I’m not sure if that tradition really is Filipino) because the idea of circles is usually part of the Chinese culture.  Maybe it’s an influence, I don’t know, I didn’t really ever think much about when I started doing it or why.

Background: The informant is a 48-year old Filipina immigrant to the United States who is married to a Filipino-Chinese man.  She learned how to cook traditional Filipino foods from scratch from her mother and oldest brother in the Philippines, where cooking meals from household items was essential to maximizing the volume of food when money was scarce.

Context: This conversation happened at the dinner table, where the informant and I were eating store-bought palabok that was not arranged in circles.

I am not really very well-connected to the Chinese aspects of my identity, since I was raised only in the Philippines and the United States, where even my Chinese relatives had largely assimilated to the cultures of their respective environments.  Arranging food in a way that invites wealth from a different culture’s beliefs is a practice of my mother’s that I found more interesting after I began to reflect upon what she told me.  The circular food and arrangement is a call back to her previous life in the Philippines, where financial stability was a primary concern at every turn.  The sprinkling of a different culture’s traditions (likely my father’s influence) reminded me of myself, the way that they are mixed together.  Food is an incredibly important aspect of family life in the Philippines, and families in a household scarcely eat their meals separately.