Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

Simbang Gabi

Age: 89
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Corona, CA
Language: English, Tagalog

Text

“I was born in the Philippines and grew up there. One ritual that stood out to me was Simbang Gabi. Every December 16th, we would begin nine days of dawn Masses leading up to Christmas. We woke up before the sun, wrapped ourselves in warm clothes, and walked to church with the stars still out. We called this Simbang Gabi, which means ‘night mass’ even though it happened just before sunrise. This originally was for farmers so they could worship before going into the fields. Even though this is a novena, it always felt like a festival too. After mass we would have puto bumbong, bibingka, and salabat.

When I moved to the United States back in the day, I missed Simbang Gabi. Eventually,I found a Filipino church group and started celebrating it again. Sometimes it’s at night instead of dawn since people work during the day. It’s not exactly the same, but the spirit is there.

Simbang Gabi is not just about going to church. It’s about preparing your heart for Jesus Christ. It’s about hope and light in the darkness. And every year, we do it again, not because we have to but because it reminds us who we are.”

Context

This narrative was shared by an 89-year-old Filipino woman currently living in Southern California. She was born and raised in the Philippines and immigrated to the United States around the 1960s. This story was told as a reflective oral account of the Simbang Gabi ritual, a Filipino Catholic tradition she participated in throughout her life, both in the Philippines and in the diaspora. 

This informant is a respected elder in her community and has acted as a cultural bearer for her children and grandchildren. She continues to practice elements of the ritual at home and at church with her church group.

My Interpretation

From a folklore perspective, Simbang Gabi functions as both a life-cycle and calendar ritual, which is tied to the Advent season and culminates on Christmas Eve. it is a clear example of intangible cultural heritage that is passed through oral tradition, communal memory, and ritual performance. The informant’s account also demonstrates how folklore adapts across geographies while retaining its symbolic core and responding to the needs of diasporic communities.

The ritual serves multiple functions since it is devotional, communal, performative, and sensory. It creates a liminal space between night and day, preparing the faithful spiritually while reaffirming cultural bonds. The informant’s memory of the Mass as both a sacred and celebratory event illustrates the blurring of ritual and festival, which is a common feature in folk tradition. This narrative also highlights how older members of a cultural group serve as active bearers of tradition, keeping practices alive even in new cultural contexts. 

Lechon

Age: 51
Occupation: English
Residence: Corona, CA

Text

“When I think about big Filipino parties like weddings, baptisms, birthdays, Christmas, and even some funerals, the first thing that comes to mind is the lechon.

Lechon is a whole roasted pig, skin golden and crispy, head and all. It’s not just food; it’s also a spectacle. When the lechon arrives, someone always yells, “andiyan na ang lechon!” (the lechon is here), like someone famous just arrived. People gather around it, phones out, kids ready to grab, and family members grabbing their plates to have a piece.

Here in California, we usually order it from a caterer. It arrives crispy and ready to eat. The most important part of the lechon is the skin. It’s crispy, salty, and slightly sweet.

Lechon isn’t just something we are eating. It is a real celebration that marks abundance, pride, and hospitality. It shows that you spared no effort to feed your guests, too. Sometimes it can become a competition of who had the best lechon.

Even when there are other yummy dishes like pancit or lumpia, the lechon is always the centerpiece. It almost feels like the lechon is the guest of honor.

When I see lechon on the table, I don’t see just food. I see a tradition. I see a family showing love the Filipino way, which is full of laughter and full bellies.”

Context

The informant of this narrative was born in the U.S. to immigrant parents from the Philippines and grew up attending traditional Filipino gatherings in both domestic and community settings. Her story centers on lechon, which is a whole roasted pig that serves as the focal point of large celebratory events. The presence of lechon transforms an ordinary gathering into a culturally significant event, and its performance carries a deep symbolic and social meaning.

My Interpretation

From a folklore perspective, lechon functions as a material symbol of abundance, kinship, and collective identity. While it is technically a food item, it is best understood as a ritual object within the context of Filipino celebrations. Its preparation and presentation serve as a ritualized performance, where cultural meaning is enacted, remembered, and passed down.

The centrality of lechon to the events positions it as a symbolic quest of honor. The pig, therefore, is not just food but a performative symbol that embodies both economic investment and cultural pride. Its role aligns with the folkloristic principle that everyday practice scan function as nonverbal, expressive culture, encoding shared beliefs and values.

Lechon also serves as a visual and sensory expression of Filipino-American identity in diaspora. Even when the preparation changes from backyard firepits in the Philippines to pre-ordered catering in California, the core symbolic structure remains there. This demonstrates the multiplicity and variation that define folklore: traditions persist not because they are static but because they adapt meaningfully to new environments while preserving key elements. 

In this sense, lechon is more than just a cuisine. It is a ritual marker of festivity, community, and cultural continuity.

Happy Birthday sung in three languages

Nationality: Taiwanese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Animation student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA / Queens, NY
Language: English

Text:

JC: “Okay, so um… for context, well you know this but my parents were originally from Taiwan, but my dad grew up in Costa Rica, so he’s picked up an understanding of Spanish. And in my family, we had this big group of like… in a lot of holiday celebrations, so like New Years or in the summer, we all tend to gather around and like, celebrate a specific holiday. And as a tradition we sing happy birthday first in English, ’cause everyone understands it, and then in Chinese to kind of like.. just for all the grandparents to understand, for them to join in, and for.. all of the like, Taiwanese people around. And then for the Costa Rican side, we end up singing it in Spanish.”

Context:

Informant JC is part of a multi-cultural and multi-lingual family. He added, “I always thought that was very interesting, like my family dynamic. I’m primarily Taiwanese-American, but we still ended up incorporating like a lot of Costa Rican cultural bits. There’s like, having Costa Rican food on the side, or being more open to Costa Rican culture. I also feel like because we’ve all like, grown up in America, like my parents moved when they were very young, and my relatives came in more progressively, and they’ve had to assimilate to American culture. A lot of what we end up doing feels very American.”

Analysis:

Happy Birthday songs are ritualized celebrations of the human life cycle, commemorating the completion of an approximate solar year since a person’s birth. They provide an opportunity for one’s community to get together and reaffirm their bonds with a person.

JC’s multilingual birthday ritual is especially significant in light of broader political changes. From 1949 to 2007, Costa Rica had diplomatic relations with Taiwan. After nearly 60 years, Costa Rica decided to break off this relationship in favor of establishing ties with China. Despite these shifting political alliances, JC’s family birthday ritual demonstrates that community bonds extend beyond the borders and interests of the nation-state.

Tang Yuan

Nationality: Taiwanese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Animation Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA / Queens, NY
Language: English

Text:

“One of the foods that we made is um.. Tang Yuan, which is like a… kind of like mochi? It’s like a glutinous rice ball and then on the inside is sesame paste. And so, it… it’s usually typically eaten during the New Year. Um… it’s just like kind of a dessert. I know it’s been more popularized within like, um… like, Taiwanese dessert places nowadays, or like dessert places in general, but they’re usually served as like a treat for introducing the New Year. Um… a while ago, like when I was really really young — I’d say like before I was five — my grandma used to make Tang Yuan by like… She didn’t have the sesame paste, it was just like flour balls, I guess? Like she’d make the sort of like, dough out of rice flour and water and then she’d dye it into different colors and like, cut it up into strips and then she’d have me and my cousins like prepare the dough balls together. And then she’d prepare a kind of uh, kind of soup, like a sweet soup to go with it. Um… I believe also typically… I prefer to eat it plain, but my dad um… My grandparents on my dad’s side — and my dad — they both kind of… they have like a somewhat Cantonese background, so they end up drinking it with like, this fermented wine, like rice wine. And it… has an ‘interesting’ taste, it’s like… it’s like the sweetness of the Tang Yuan on itself is pretty good, and it’s like, the fermented rice wine is very bitter, and very pungent…. and so it’s like, I don’t know how they acquired the taste for it but, um, my dad typically eats it with this sort of rice wine. And also, when you eat it… I think it represents currency. ’cause the ‘yuan’ at the end… and ‘tang’ is usually like ‘sweet.’ So like ‘sweet money.'”

Context:

Tang Yuan are a traditional Chinese dessert, although they can be sweet or savory. They are often made for holidays and festivals, especially the Lunar New Year. There are several variations on Tang Yuan recipes, but the most common one involves making a dough out of glutenous rice flour and water, stuffing the dough balls with a sweet black sesame paste, boiling, and serving warm in a sweet syrup. Tang Yuan are said to represent togetherness and completeness.

Analysis:

Dishes like Tang Yuan are often made for festivals to commemorate calendar cycles and bring people together. They represent connections to community and a sense of continuity of tradition and culture. For informant JC, Tang Yuan are a dish that holds significance beyond the process of cooking and eating — they play a role in connecting him to his Taiwanese identity as he and his family navigate American culture and expectations of assimilation.

Adventist Communion Bread

Nationality: American
Age: 55
Occupation: Marriage & Family Therapist
Residence: Forest Falls, CA
Language: English

Text:

JB: “There’s a recipe for making Seventh-day Adventist communion bread, and there’s a tradition that whatever you don’t use, you’re supposed to take it outside and burn it. I think that some churches still do this – I don’t actually know. It’s supposed to be whole grain flour, salt, water, and oil. I think that because it’s been blessed, it shouldn’t be used for any purpose other than communion. I think it’s an Adventist tradition. And the recipe for the bread, I think it’s… you can either do part whole wheat flour and white flour or you can do all whole wheat flour. And then.. I don’t know the precise amounts but some salt, some water and some oil. And then you want it to be a pretty firm dough, you roll it out. A lot of times people will kind of score it and then bake it till it’s firm.”

Context:

Informant JB was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, which is a branch of Protestant Christianity that is distinct for its dietary restrictions and emphasis on the Sabbath. For Adventists, communion is a symbolic act of consuming the body (as unleavened bread) and blood (as grape juice — Adventists typically do not consume alcohol) of Jesus to commemorate his crucifixion. JB suggested that the tradition of burning leftover communion bread because according to the Bible, Christ’s body did not decay in the tomb.

Analysis:

The ritual preparation and burning of the unleavened bread reflects the church’s intentions to set apart the bread as sacred. Sometimes the leftover grape juice is also poured out. Interestingly, these acts are considered grave sins in the Catholic church, as the bread and wine which are blessed during Mass are believed to be literal manifestations of Christ’s body and blood. Leftover Eucharist is typically consumed by the priest or dissolved in water and disposed of in a respectful manner. This reversal of meaning reflects the broader Protestant departure from Catholic beliefs as well as the particular bias in the Adventist community against the Catholic church. Overall, this tradition points to the nature of reactionary movements in the history of religion as well as performances of sacredness in religious communities.