Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

Kicking the Flagpole

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/15
Primary Language: English

The informant cites a well-known tradition here at USC: kicking the flagpole on the way to the Coliseum to cheer our football team to victory. Students, their families, professors, and many other USC fans flock towards the Coliseum in a group. Those walking from the direction of campus (usually most of the students, their families, and professors) pass by a group of flagpoles. In passing, each person in the crowd sticks a foot out and kicks the flagpole to bring victory for USC. He remembers the first time he ever kicked the flagpole as a freshman in 2011: “I was excited. It felt good to be taking part in such a huge tradition. I think it was that moment that really solidified in my mind that I was a part of the Trojan Family, that I was allowed to take part in this tradition because I belonged.”

The way he speaks about kicking the flagpole shows that it’s more than just a long-standing tradition meant to show school spirit and bring good luck to the team; it’s also a rite of passage. The moment a new student kicks the flagpole, they’ve crossed a liminal point; they’ve taken part in an important and exclusive USC ritual for the first time. They become a part of the tradition, and a part of the USC family.

How To “Cheers” Properly on New Year’s Eve

Nationality: Irish
Age: 22
Occupation: Student, studying Biomedical Engineering
Residence: Bradenton, FL and Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/15
Primary Language: English

In the informant’s family, it’s unacceptable to clink glasses at a New Year’s Eve celebration without making direct eye contact with the other person for the duration of the toast. She says the tradition – and the superstition behind it – come from her mother.

“My mom always used to remind me to look people in the eyes when we raised our glasses in a toast,” she says. “She believed that avoiding eye contact would not only prevent good luck, but would actively invite bad luck upon the topic of cheers.” So if, for instance, someone made a toast to good health, her mother feared that avoiding eye contact during the toast would most certainly result in the death or illness of someone at the gathering.

The informant says her mother got the belief from someone she met in college. That person’s belief stemmed from a personal belief that looking into one another’s eyes connects people, and that it is this connectedness and positivity during a toast or a wish that determines that toast’s or wish’s success.

Swedish Årsgång: The Year Walk

Nationality: Irish and American
Age: 24
Occupation: Student, Freelance writer
Residence: Dallas, TX and Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/10/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant heard this particularly sinister and magical ritual from a Swedish friend from Malmö when she was studying abroad a few years ago in Europe.

The pseudo-pagan ritual of Årsgång, which, when translated to English, means Year Walk, was meant to reveal visions of the future to a person willing to perform the walk. In order to perform the ritual, the walker would have to make several sacrifices and meet multiple requirements. The first requirement was that the ritual be performed on a certain night, most often Christmas or New Years’ Eve, sometimes at the winter solstice, but always at midnight. For an entire day before taking the Year Walk, the walker must sit inside a dark room, and is not allowed to eat or speak. This was meant to disconnect the walker from the physical world, and open them up to the spiritual world before the ritual. The walker was to emerge from the room exactly at midnight and head to the town church, where he or she would walk counterclockwise around the building. The walker would then go up to the door of the church and blow into the keyhole, renouncing their faith temporarily. This would fully open the walker up to the world of the spirits and visions of the future, but it also invited great danger. Year Walking was full of risks.

One could expect to encounter many terrifying Swedish entities, such as the brook-horse (bäckahäst) and the huldra.  The brook-horse took the shape of a normal horse, and it would invite children to ride on its back. Each time a child mounted the brook-horse, its back would lengthen to accommodate yet another rider. When the horse felt it had enough riders, it would jump into a body of water, drowning all of its riders and taking their souls for its own. The huldra was a deceptively beautiful female entity, who often had bark and treelike features growing on her back instead of skin. Said to be the forest guardians, they would lure people to their homes to either marry them or kill them. Either way, the victim would be lost forever.

The walker’s ultimate goal was to look into the windows of the church (or to reach the town cemetery, depending on the locale) in order to receive visions of the future. If the walker encountered any of the Swedish entities, including the two mentioned above, the walker could escape with his or her life if he or she was able to resist the entity’s temptation. Visions of the year to come would appear in the cemetery or in the windows of the church, and the things the walker saw would symbolize the events to come that year. The Year Walk would end once the walker made it back to the church to reclaim his or her faith.

Årsgång was more commonly performed centuries ago, when magical beliefs ran much deeper in Scandinavia. The ritual was a feared one; not all walkers returned with their lives, and others went insane upon returning from the walk. Of course, the steps of Year Walking vary, as it’s a very localized ritual, mostly passed down by word of mouth.

In his doctoral dissertation on magic in Swedish black art books, Thomas K. Johnson, Ph.D. briefly discusses the ritual of Årsgång. I found a PDF version for free online directly at this link: http://media.proquest.com/media/pq/classic/doc/2030700591/fmt/ai/rep/SPDF?_s=mheSU7Ogp7e1UoKhtmSNlGL9Lao%3D

Holiday Mashed Potatoes Recipe

Nationality: Irish
Age: 22
Occupation: Student, studying Biomedical Engineering
Residence: Bradenton, FL and Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/15
Primary Language: English

Every Christmas and Thanksgiving, the informant’s grandmother would make mashed potatoes from an old family recipe. “We Irish love our potatoes,” she said. The recipe isn’t written down anywhere. Her grandmother only passes it down on her side of the family, and in order to memorize the recipe correctly, one must memorize how the potatoes taste when they’re made correctly. Anyone who wants to learn the potato recipe has to spend several holiday seasons making the potatoes alongside someone who already knows the recipe and correct balance of ingredients by heart. The learning process is like an initiation ritual for that side of the family. Almost everyone descended from that side knows how to make the potatoes. The informant says that she got her grandmother’s permission before giving away the recipe. “My grandma doesn’t think anyone would be able to get the flavor balance right anyway, even with the ingredients list,” she said. The ingredients are as follows:

Fresh and hot batch of mashed potatoes, made from scratch, sour cream, plain cream cheese, butter, heavy cream, salt, and white pepper. Her grandmother says it’s important that the potatoes be tangy, but not too much. “It’s a season to taste type of thing,” says the informant.

The informant and her grandmother have been making the potatoes together for several years. They only make them during Thanksgiving and Christmas when the members of their extended family are around to enjoy the potatoes.

Keeping the Workers in Line

Nationality: Chilean
Age: 60
Occupation: Agronomist/Coffee Plantation Manager
Residence: Hawaii
Performance Date: 03/16/15
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

I collected this piece of folklore from my dad during the first half of Spring Break, when we were visiting a friend. We had just finished dinner and were still sitting around the dining table, when we began to tell stories.

Script

Dad: “In the past the landlords used to own wineries, and they would put the wine to age, and the peasants, they used to go at night and steal the wine. So, they said… You know, they’re superstitious. They believe a lot of stuff, so at night the patrones (landlords) put the figure of el Diablo (the devil) in front of a light, like a candle or a lantern, and it project the face of el Diablo. And the peasants get scared, and all they run away, to scare them out of the wine, because Chileans, the peasants, they were very drunk, and alcoholic, the majority. They wanted to scare the peasants. My trabajadores (workers), I used to live on a farm, and my father had many campesinos (peasants) working for him. My father used to go have meetings in the attic, and he would carry chains. Big chains, like (makes noise of dragging chain), to scare them, and they used to run away from the place. They used to tell them that if they don’t behave, the ghosts show up and walk on the roof. But it was my father, hiding at night, passing the thing, making noises.

Me: “In other words, your father wasn’t superstitious?”

Dad: “No, no of course (not). Me too. He was the patrón, defending the patrones. You know I found myself doing exactly the same with my Mexican workers. I hired about twenty workers, and we put housing in Kona Kai, in Kona (in Hawaii), and I told them, ‘You know, you have to be careful, because if you misbehave, in this house, a woman was killed twenty years ago, you know, and she hang herself from this roof…’ You know, invent things. And they believe.”

Me: “Did they ever catch you?”

Dad: “Yeah, now we’re friends. But you know they were very astute. It’s like a practical joke you do on then and keep the secret for, until they found out.”

Background & Analysis

My dad was raised in Rancagua, Chile, which is a city outside of Santiago. His father worked alongside the landlords of wineries, and they would perform these practical jokes to keep the workers in line. Learning from his father, my dad implemented this type of pranking with his workers on the coffee plantations he currently manages.

This means of keeping order, and determining who was trustworthy or not, via practical joking, was very clever. Also, my dad described that those who found out or were told, became in on the secret, and this is an example of the liminal theory, and those workers transitioned.