There was once a poet called Qu Yuan. He witnessed his country falling apart. With full patriotism, he committed suicide by jumping into the Yangzi River. People commemorate him nowadays by celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival. Celebration includes dragon boat racing and dumping rice dumplings into the water.
This is an interesting festival, and I can’t think of any American festivals or holidays that celebrate someone committing suicide.
At Interlochen in Michigan. There was always a statue of a bear on campus, and it was a tradition for everyone just to pee on the bear. Usually just done at the end of the year cause it’s usually snowy during the rest of the year. Started by academy kids, no idea how it really started. I actually did it once. It was funny because sometimes people who didn’t know would sit on the bear, and it was really gross.
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There is a really weird tradition, but it makes sense that it would come from a bunch of kids at an away-from-home school.
At my high school before I got there, there was a soccer team named the Fighting Blueberries because it was an art school and nobody did sports. And then a group of latino men wanted to reform it and named it the Rainbow Twinks. They were very proud of it. It was a tradition to give the soccer team a silly name every time.
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This is funny, as most of my experiences with high school sports teams have been pretty serious names.
At summer camp—there’s a horn solo in Liszt Les Prelude. People in the orchestra supposed to throw pennies at the horn player. Camp has been around since the 1800s. Heard about it from other people in the orchestra, but I never saw it happen.
This took place at the informant’s high school, Interlochen.
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This seems like a really bizarre tradition, and it’s kind of strange that it was talked about and passed along by students, but never followed through during my informant’s time there.
The following is from an interview between me and my friend, Brie, while I walked with her to the grocery store. She told me about a tradition in her family of telling stories called “Whoppers”, which were kind of like campfire stories. Her grandfather, or “papa”, was the one to mainly uphold this tradition within the family.
Brie: “In my family we always told ‘Whoppers’, so we’d always tell, like, stories around the campfire.”
Me: “‘Whoppers’, it was called?”
Brie: “Whoppers. And basically they’re just not true stories. And… he was really good at that, my papa…”
Me: “Can you give me an example of a Whopper?”
Brie: “The Green Monster…”
Me: “The what?”
Brie: “He would always say, like, The Green— or, what was it…? The Shadow… my papa would do this voice, like (raspy), ‘The Shadow,’ and it was like… I’m trying to remember. It was just terrifying. But… hold on, let me think real quick…”
Me: “How do you spell ‘Whopper’?”
Brie: “‘Whopper’? Um– I think, like a– you know, like a ‘Double Whopper’.”
Me: “Oh ok, like Burger King?”
Brie: (Laughs very hard) “Yep. No, it was just a thing in my family, telling Whoppers. I never was good at it, but my cousins would come up with really good Whoppers.”
Me: “Do you know where–uh– where your grandfather got, like, the term ‘Whopper’ from? Did he just make that up or what was it?”
Brie: “So he grew up in, like, South Boston… one of eight kids, and… you know, Scotch family, Catholic, um… he… I don’t– I think it was his dad that began the Whoppers.”
Me: “What made a good Whopper?”
Brie: “A good Whopper was, like, got you on the edge of your seat, like… you know, it was kinda scary, kinda suspenseful, but also, like, funny and far-fetched. So a little of, like, all of that, kinda.”
It was really cool to see that, basically, just by assigning a name to the more general idea of campfire stories, Brie’s family created a kind of tradition that was all their own.