Elf on the Shelf

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Los Angeles and North Carolina
Performance Date: 04/15/19
Primary Language: English

“Around Christmas time we would decorate the house, and one of the decorations was this little elf, and it was supposedly watching for Santa, and it would move every morning, or every week or so, to a different spot in the house. I believed in it at first but then I started becoming the one who moved it, because my parents stopped. I don’t know how to word that right, but I became God. I’ll probably do it again for my kids because it’s fun. And not at all religious. My best friend also did it and we bonded over how we used to think it was real. And I know it’s a pretty common thing where I was and probably in lots of the rest of America.”

Background: My informant, AB, likes Elf on the Shelf mostly because it is innocent fun. She picked it up from her parents and family, who in turn found it either from friends or from the physical elf product.

Her comment that she would carry on the tradition not only because it’s fun, but because it’s not religious in her view, is interesting.  She made this comment in part because, although AB was raised Christian, she has become agnostic and disillusioned with organized religion. She takes more interest in astrology and various magical traditions than in any institutional faith. However, though the Elf on the Shelf tradition may not be explicitly religious, and certainly is not biblical in the manner of many other Christmas traditions, it is nevertheless connected with a primarily Christian holiday.

However, even Christmas has roots in other, “pagan,” winter traditions, including the celebration of the solstice. Traditions which disregard the official, Biblical elements of Christmas and incorporate informal games are common around this time, including the Christmas Pickle and various forms of gift swap events.

Christmas Pickle

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student, Musician
Residence: Los Angeles and Florida
Performance Date: 04/21/2019
Primary Language: English

LC: “So every year that we would celebrate Christmas at my grandmother’s we would have all the grandkids gather around the Christmas tree and try to find the pickle on the tree and I think it was for Jesus or good luck or something. And one year I found the pickle and that was cool! But we haven’t been to my grandparents’ house in so long now, so it’s just a fond memory.”

Is this just a tradition in your family, or was it a regional thing, do you know?

LC: “I feel like other people do it as well, but I haven’t really met anyone else who does it. I feel like it’s a Southern thing maybe?”

LC: “Really it was just a game for kids to play in the family. You know the thing with the wishbone where you pull it apart and whoever gets the big piece wins? It’s sort of like that except only one person wins out of the like 9 grandkids or so.”

Background:

LC picked up this tradition from her family, who live and have lived in both Florida and Texas. It is not particularly significant to her, and serves more as a fun game than a serious tradition. She remembers it fondly; it has no positive or negative ideological significance, only nostalgia.

Context:

LC mentioned this custom during a discussion of family holiday traditions after we had Easter dinner with friends. The tradition takes place only during Christmas, and is associated with other physical aspects of the holiday; it piggybacks on the larger, more general tradition of decorating the Christmas tree.

Interpretation:

I tend to agree with LC that this tradition, wherever it might be practiced, is almost certainly a lighthearted game played for fun among families. She mentions that it might be for Jesus or good luck, but her uncertainty and lack of concern about such significance suggest it has no particular ideological or religious role. As for the extent of the tradition, LC is right in that other families also have Christmas Pickle ornament traditions. However, its history is fairly uncertain. A brief search suggests that it could be a German tradition, or could be a fabricated tradition by 19th-century glassblowers to sell ornaments. Either way, it seems to be a moderately common Christmas tradition, similar in some ways to Elf on the Shelf. Both are unconnected with the more religious aspects of Christmas, and both involve adults hiding an object from children. Furthermore, both might be created to encourage product sales.

For another description of the Christmas Pickle tradition given by a seminary employee, see here

 

 

Dropped silverware summons guests

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: California
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

LC: “What we always said when I was a kid was that if you dropped- when you dropped a knife on the floor, somebody would say, ‘oh, that means a man is coming for dinner.’ And if you dropped a fork, that meant, ‘oh, a woman’s coming to dinner.’ It was my job to empty the dishwasher, and to set the table with silverware and stuff. And I don’t know if anybody ever told me this, but I sort of extrapolated that if you dropped a spoon, it meant a kid was coming to dinner. I would drop spoons now and then in hopes of generating some visitors. It worked.”

Was this just your family or was it a more widespread belief?

LC: “I don’t feel like it- it wasn’t just us. It was definitely something I feel like other kids did. I would think it was regional, I don’t think it was like a family thing, like from one side of the family or the other. I feel like it was something that came from my sisters rather than my parents. You know, a lot of things in our family came from my dad and his Boy Scout stuff, but I don’t think that did.”

Background: LC grew up in Connecticut. This belief was held by many of her peers, including her older sisters. She does not hold this belief anymore, simply due to outgrowing it.

Context: This ritual, as it were, is performed when setting the table for dinner, or otherwise handling silverware.

Interpretation:

This belief both reflects a superstition about dropping silverware having seemingly unrelated consequences, as well as an intentional ritual which takes advantage of this superstition to try and invoke the consequences. I find it interesting that in this superstition, clumsiness is connected to a neutral or even beneficial consequence, rather than to a negative consequence. For example, spilling salt leads to bad luck, unless you negate it by throwing salt over your shoulder. Because the clumsy act in this case leads to a consequence which LC saw as positive, she was motivated to intentionally drop spoons from time to time.

The Moon Festival

Nationality: Taiwanese-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/5/2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin Chinese

Main Text

Subject: I feel like The Moon Festival for us is like the lowest key of the holidays, I think because the activity is usually just like, eating mooncake? And my parents aren’t like, particularly handy with baking, so we always just like, buy it from the store…maybe like Ranch 99, or Sheng Kee (subject laughs). And then…we’ll like have, maybe like, two sets, and then we just like, have it our house, and like, we’re sneaking bites up until the holiday, and then, the night of, I think we just like, prop up a couple of chairs, and like, sit outside and observe the moon and my parents will like, tell the same stories. Um…and then, you like, go back inside.

So like the whole…the whole observing of tradition takes, maybe like an hour. But, I think, like having the mooncake in the house is like pretty common, like having it for two or three weeks before and after.

Background

The subject is a 22-year-old Taiwanese-American woman in her fourth year at USC. Her parents are immigrants from Taiwan, and celebrating Chinese festivals have been a family tradition since childhood.

The interviewer is a 21-year-old Taiwanese-American student in his third year at USC. As someone who is from the same folk group, he is familiar with most major Chinese festivals.

By “tell the same stories,” the subject is referring to myths about the Moon Festival. Previously in the interview, the subject was asked to retell the myth of Chang-E (嫦娥), the immortal lady in the moon. However, the subject was unable to tell the myth in full without the interviewer being requested to fill in several gaps in the story.

Context

Growing up, the subject considered the observance of Chinese festivals such as this one a normal part of life. She grew up in Sunnyvale, California, where there were many Taiwanese people also participating in the tradition of celebrating these festivals. For her, the tradition was analogous to a Catholic family going to mass—something that was specific to that family and its folk group, that not all families (especially those outside the folk group) did.

The subject thinks about her family’s observance festival within the greater context of her family having a tradition of observing major Chinese festivals. She values the comfort of how the annual routine of returning home to celebrate these festivals reaffirms the stability of her family’s dynamic, relative to other Taiwanese-American families she has grown up with. Over the years, she has witnessed the families whose children are closer in age experience dramatic shifts in parental dynamics, after the children have left for college. Because of those shifts, those families tend to be less consistent in maintaining festival observances.

Unlike other families whose children are closer in age, the subject has two younger sisters. The middle sister is seven years younger than her. Because of the children’s large age gaps, her parents have continued to stick to the same everyday routines, such as driving the kids to high school, that the subject has known growing up. In a way, the family’s annual festival observances parallel the seemingly timeless everyday routines that the subject has grown up knowing.

Interviewer’s Analysis

Despite the brevity of the festival observation described, there are several notable items of folklore within. One is the iconic mooncake, which, beyond visually resembling the moon, was historically used to convey secret messages during wartime. Some modern, factory-produced mooncakes still reference this tradition, by including paper messages inside the mooncakes themselves, or by printing Chinese text on the surface of the mooncake. The sharing of messages through mooncakes, once done in personalized privacy, has now become commodified and publicized. The fact that the subject’s family eats mooncakes while sharing traditional Moon Festival myths adds a postmodern twist to the sharing of mooncake messages. It is a repetition of stories from the past in a present where a family watches the moon in private, while consuming mass-produced mooncakes with mass-produced text inscriptions. Moreover, the parents repeat this tradition every year, telling the same stories, only for the subject and her siblings to continuously forget them, almost as if so they can be annually reminded of them again. Is this truly a preservation of tradition, or is this an observation of selective tradition decay?

Cutting Tofu in the Dark

Nationality: Korean-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/6/2019
Primary Language: English

Main Text

Subject: One day, a young man who had been a scholar for many years, was like, mother I have been writing calligraphy for many years, I’m really good at it and I am going to drop out of school, because I’m, like—this is as good as my calligraphy is going to get, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic. (Subject chuckles.) And then the mom is like: okay. Like. That.

Interviewer: (Interviewer laughs.)

Subject: So she turns off the light, and she made him write, like, ten lines calligraphy or something, and she is like, you will—in that time, I will be cutting my vegetables. And when she turned on the lights, her like, knife cuts were like, really beautiful, all these like, perfect little equal, equal squares. And his calligraphy was shit. And so I think the moral of that was like—(subject laughs)—don’t do—like, you can’t, you’re not allowed to quit something unless you’re as, you’re good enough to do it in the dark.

Background

The subject is a 20-year-old Korean-American student at USC. Her parents frequently told her tales from Korean folklore or Korean books throughout childhood. She first heard this tale when she was five.

Context

This was a tale the subject’s mother told her every time she said she wanted to quit piano or viola, which is why the subject feels like it’s “really Korean.” At five, the subject argued with their mother about it, protesting that cutting vegetables and writing calligraphy were two entirely incomparable things. She felt that the premise of the tale was unfair and illogical.

Now, the subject thinks the tale is funny—she thinks the mother is right to put “the small man” in his place. As a child, the subject devalued the domestic labor of cutting vegetables, thinking calligraphy was clearly the superior and more useful practice—but as a present-day college student, she understands and appreciates the difficult labor involved in vegetable cutting. The subject also disagrees with the moral of the story, for different reasons. She thinks that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly, and that being able to do something perfectly is no reason to quit.

The subject shared this tale to a friend at a majority-Asian social event recently, when she was making fun of her friend for being bad at cutting tofu. The friend had never heard of the story, and did not respond with hostility to the folkloric jab.

Interviewer Analysis

Tracking the subject’s changing relationships to the tale show how power dynamics between a performer and their audience can really affect the interpretation of folklore. As a child being told the tale by a mother who was using it to essentially scold the child for wanting to quit undesirable extracurricular activities, the subject naturally had a resentful narrative interpretation. The subject likely identified with the son in the story, who was forbidden from quitting calligraphy even though he wanted to.

Once the subject grew up, and the power dynamic between them and their mother became less unequal, the subject was able to go beyond interpreting the story from the perspective of the son, and empathize with the perspective of the mother. In addition, the subject felt comfortable enough with the lack of true psychological threat in the story, to jokingly using it to make fun of a peer, and have a little fun with the power dynamics that once wounded her as a child.