“Kay like a tradition for my family is, like the holidays, like Christmas Day, a family tradition is we always meet at my grandma’s house. It doesn’t matter where you live, whether you’re from out of state, everybody goes there. It’s the WHOLE family, that’s been a tradition forever. As far as other holidays go, those are like kinda optional, it’s not like a big deal. Easter Sunday is another one; you don’t have to go to church, but you have to be at my grandma’s house.

We eat a lot of food there, and there are usually like 3 groups – one group that is like the highly successful who look down on the others, you know, the second group smokes like a lot of marijuana, and then there are the older people who sit and gossip about the church. Kay then when we eat, it’s always always always fried chicken, greens, cornbread, and sometimes there’s potato salad, but that’s like more 4th of July. When we were younger, we would play, me and my cousins, hopscotch and boardgames like Monopoly though we of course don’t do that anymore. I also like there to joke with people.”

Americans put great emphasis on the holiday picture of family, an image that resembles a Norman Rockwell painting. For the informant’s holidays, family is the whole picture, and grandma’s house is the traditional framework. The informant also described how the family is split into parts, with people of different statuses and ages dividing themselves from each other. The tradition of meeting every year, in spite of personal differences then, seems more compulsory then instead of renewed want. At the same time, however, like how the informant said, the holiday does not necessarily need to be about religion or what the holiday may have originally represented; for these Americans, the holiday is purely about family, whether they feel united or not, and going to any physical length to be together.