Tag Archives: christmas

Christmas Tradition

Nationality: African American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 25, 2015
Primary Language: English

Informant H is 19 years old and was born in Inglewood CA, and moved to a place near Valencia just outside of LA soon after she was born. After 5 years, her little sister was born, then her little brother, and then her youngest sister. The family then moved to Bakersfield. H homeschooled for many years and then transitioned into a public high school.

H: So in my family, I guess it started when we moved to Bakersfield, so we had to start over basically, so we had to get a new tree, and like new decorations. So we started this tradition where every Christmas we go and like as a family, my mom, my dad, me, my little sister, my little brother, and my youngest sister, so as a family we go and we find, in our city, a Christmas ornament and everyone gets to pick one Christmas ornament. And we do that every year and now our Christmas tree has so many ornaments on it because we’ve been there for about 10 years and so that is something we do every year.

Me: So do people pick the same type of ornament? Do you have like a style like ‘oh I pick the dancer ornaments…’

H: I guess my littlest sister…she always picks stuff like sparkly or pink so you know those are her ornaments. My brother picks like shiny cars and dinosaurs. So I guess we all sort of pick stuff that reflects our personality maybe what were interested in at the time. Like I have one that’s a cowboy boot from when I rode horses.

Me: So does it serve anything more practical than just oh we need to get ornaments for our tree?

H: Oh definitely it’s something we can depend on for Christmas time being together and we do this together as a family. And also it’s our tree in our house and all these ornaments aren’t random we hand selected each and every one, and they reflect us.

Me: So in a way when you look at your tree you can see your family…that’s really cool do people ever comment on the ornaments?

H: Oh definitely people are like ‘oh that’s a cute ornament’. And were like ‘oh there’s a story behind that’.

Me: So do a lot of the ornaments have these individual stories with them?

H: Um a lot of them do I know a couple fights were started over a couple ornaments.

Me: Care to share any fun stories about any of them any of the fights…?

H: Okay well there is this one this chandelier ornament it’s silvery and it has crystals on it. So we were going to the place, I think it was World Market, and my little sister saw it and she was like ‘Oh that’s like a cool ornament’, and she keeps walking because she wants to keep her options open. And then my other sister sees it and she’s like ‘oh my gosh I want this ornament so much’ and then my youngest one obviously plays the whole, ‘I’m cute I’m the youngest I should get this ornament’. And then the older sister was like ‘I should get this ornament because you always get the sparkly ornaments’ and the littlest one said ‘No I should get this ornament because I always get the sparkly ornaments’. And just like so much chaos. And eventually my little sister broke into tears and we’re like ‘it’s Christmas time you can have the sparkly chandelier ornament’ so there’s always this like bitterness when it’s time to pull out the sparkly ornament. And they always fight about who gets to put it on the tree. It’s very ridiculous. I think it’s hilarious.

Me: That’s so funny, do you all put your own ornaments on the tree?

H: We do. Sometimes people will forget because there’s so many, people like forget which ornaments are theirs, so like fights ensue because of that.

Me: I’m sure it still brings all you together though.

H: It does it’s fun times.

Me: Is it sort of interesting being away at college now? Are you the oldest?

H: I’m the oldest.

Me: So does that change any of the dynamic? Do they have to go pick ornaments without you one day? Because I know I usually get home right before Christmas, is that ever a problem…?

H: Well sometimes they have to put up the tree without me but sometimes, I think last year, they left all my ornaments there. Or they wait for me to come home so we get all of our ornaments together. So yeah they definitely want to make it a whole family.

Me: So sweet. Do you guys go to the same place every year?

H: Yeah we usually go to World Market, but sometimes we go to other places but they always have awesome really cool individualized ornaments.

 

Analysis:

H’s family definitely emphasizes them being together to celebrate this holiday with their own special family tradition. Even though an argument might have come from it, this tradition serves to bring her family closer together, especially now that she is living away from home. The tree is a way to express themselves all individually while still celebrating their family as a whole.  This tradition might be even more important for their family as their children start moving away from home to go to college, so this tradition of coming home for Christmas and doing this tradition as a family might become more special over the years.

CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS

Nationality: Irish-American
Age: 54
Occupation: Environmental Government Employee
Residence: Boston, MA
Performance Date: 3/25/15
Primary Language: English

ABOUT THE INFORMANT:

My informant is a mother of three who lives just outside of Boston with her husband of over 30 years. She is originally from Cape Cod, the part of Massachusetts that is full of beaches and is a world known tourist destination. She is a lover of all thing water; she has worked extensively in water policy and water pollution as an environmentalist.

EXAMPLE:

Interviewee: My dad never did any Christmas shopping for anybody. He always left it all to Mom. As he got older, I guess he got much more free time. He would spend all year going to flea markets. Just searching for Christmas gifts. Sometimes something would catch his eye and he would not even know what it was. The year I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing tennis, I got Tennis For Dummies.

He would just give everyone a massive bag full of stuff. A bag for each person. All this cheap stuff he found at these yard sales and Salvation Armies; sometimes it was thoughtful, but most of it was crap.

It was the worst for the people dating into the family. When Lynn, my sister-in-law, first starting coming to the family Christmas, she got all these random things that no one knew anything about. Weird pieces of wood. A styrofoam ball. But she just took it and said thank you, trying to be polite, while he was just laughing because he knew that he gave crap. But then she surprised us all one year when she turned around and glued it together and created a figurine. Then she gave it to him.

We would come home with so much crap, we couldn’t keep it all, but I do have a farting Santa doll.

Interviewer: What about when he got sick?

Interviewee: When he passed away, we wanted to keep it alive. It was so much fun. We couldn’t all give everyone presents; that was just too much. But we all picked names and gave personalized stockings with funny and outrageous, sometimes nice, gifts to the person.

Interviewer: And you still do it?

Interviewee: Yeah, I mean, no one wanted to give it up. It is hard though. It is all tailored to them. There are no gift certificates. You have to really go out and think about them. It’s nice, even if it is crap. It’s crap tailored for them. Thoughtful crap.

ANALYSIS:

There is so much stress around Christmas. It clearly has become so overwhelmingly commercial and impersonal, that I feel like what her father was doing was almost the anti-version of that. Not to be a hipster or part of a counter culture or whatever, but because that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to give hand picked crap. Just for the joke or shock. Because he was such a strong figure in this family and because he would not stop doing it, it became a tradition.

When he died, that is when it took on a whole new dimension. Not wanting to give him or it up they modified it, so that people kept getting these personalized stockings. Even though he was gone, the stockings and laughter did not have to go. That is most likely the sentimental aspect of it. On a practical level, it is a really good way to make sure that people get gifts for Christmas that feel as though they were personally chosen for them. An added benefit.

 

Christmas exchange

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 30, 2014
Primary Language: English

“On my dad’s side of the family there’s about 50 people. He’s the youngest of 7 kids and they have kids and even they have kids. So it’s like three generations of people. We use to do a gift exchange where we drew names with a price limit according to the generation. But now we have a new tradition where we donate to charity instead. We keep the same price limit, $40 for my dad’s generation, $30 for my age group and so on. So like my generation would pull $30 from everyone in that age group. Each age group pulls their collections into a group. And then each year, it rotates between the seven siblings, their family decides where the donations go to. So this year will be my dad’s ‘turn.’ My dad and mom will choose where their age groups donation is going to. And then my brother and I will pick where the money is going to for the collection from our generation.”

I find this tradition interesting because in the last few decades, with globalization there has been a movement towards more humanitarian actions. People have become more aware through media of human rights, health issues, natural disasters, and other struggles communities and groups are facing. This family tradition of my roommate reflects this awareness. Because her family is made up of so many members they are able to make a sizable contribution. They are definitely focusing on the theme of giving during the American “holiday season” and not of receiving. It goes against what the Christmas tradition has morphed into with the consumer culture that has developed in American and Western society. It’s also great that they involve the younger generations as well and teach them this selflessness from an early age.

Christmas-time: Swedish Smorgasbord, Train Park, and Caroling

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles - Originally from Phoenix, AZ
Performance Date: April 28, 2014
Primary Language: English

Informant’s self- description: “I see myself as very American. I come from a family that my parents have had a happy marriage for many years and I think that has definitely informed my life, more so than I had realized when I was growing up, when it just seemed like, oh that’s just what it is – but now interacting with other people when that wasn’t the case it’s definitely a unique perspective on relationships and everything in general. I feel like that’s a defining thing.  Family’s a really big deal – we have multiple gatherings throughout the year. Most of my family lives in the same state so we’ll all get together a ton of times throughout the year. So family is a big identifying thing and a really important thing to me. Another one is that I like to see myself as a creative person with all the things that come with that, which is – I might be going totally off the rails with this. I feel like – being a creative person I don’t know how much of it is things I just associate with creative people, so I just see that as something I should live up to, but there’s a whole ‘troubled writer’ persona – there are times were you just kinda want to fit in to that. There are times when I feel like I should live up to that ‘ideal writer.’ Another thing that comes with being creative and to me – there’s a romanticism to the bohemian lifestyle, ‘we can just make it with nothing but our art and each other. And that’s all you need to survive.’ And that’s a cool thing instead of ‘that’s a horrible idea, and you’re basically homeless.’ But to me there’s a romanticism in that.”

—

You said family gatherings are a really big thing. You said you just consider yourself American. But beyond that does your family have any specific heritage that you guys are proud of?

Swedish, absolutely Swedish. On Christmas we always have a Swedish smorgasbord for dinner and we all bring stuff for it.

Are there any traditional dishes that you guys make?

There’s lots of fish and I’m not a big fan of fish to be honest, but I always put up with it – I’m a fan of the tradition. So I can handle it. Part of it is though I – it’s an interesting thing. At least being American I feel like there are now these traditions – definitely things – I’m just gonna associate them with Christmastime, ‘cause that’s when  can most clearly see stuff. But there are things I’ve picked up from my family that I don’t know when it became a tradition – like we actually talked about this recently. I was like “I don’t know when it was decided we would do this every year” but it just became one of those things. So there’s a bunch and I can remember at what point in my life those got added to the traditions. So we did. But there’s a train park in my hometown and it’s open year-round but at Christmastime they deck the train track out with lights, and they have these mini trains that we always thought were cooler for some reason, I don’t know why. That’s a place we would always go every time the family got together. We would go there. So any year when we didn’t, us kids – my brother and then also my cousins are the kids – this is on my mom’s side of the family – I really remember distinctly one year we got together and we were just having dinner around Christmastime and we were like “when are we going to the train park?” and they were like “oh, we’re not doing it today” and we were like “WHAT? We do it every Christmas!” I think we had done it like two Christmases before, but it became essential after that. Another thing more recently is I did choir in high school, which is ridiculous looking back on it. But I did it. We – there was a small group of us that would go caroling at Christmastime. We just did it one year because we had off time, and we were like why not – Mill Avenue was the big college street in my hometown and that’s where we went. We dressed up in old caroler stuff and went there.

What is “old caroler stuff?”

Like Victorian caroler outfits. Which we had, I don’t know why. But we had them. Because we had caroling gigs that were concerts, for our choir. And we just had the outfits and were like “ah, let’s just do it.”  And so we hung out throughout the night there and just sang songs. And then – that was my senior year, so we all went off to college. But over winter break, a lot of people were home and they were just like “let’s do it again” so now it’s become this thing we do whenever we go back home. It’s interesting seeing – I feel that with tradition you tie so much of it into the past but you sometimes forget new ones will be created and you’re not intentionally setting out to create one, but you’re beginning one whether you know it or not.

Tell me more about this caroling tradition that you guys started. You said you guys just decided to do it one year. But who was the one who really brought it up?

I was kinda the ringleader of it. I was a big showman in high school, I don’t know why. But I just was. Because – we had caroling gigs. We had multiple times where we would go to different competitions and we would do it, so we had the repertoire memorized. And there’s always musical groups on that street. And we had time in between two things we were supposed to be at, and I found other people I knew who were really into choir, and I was like “hey, why don’t we get together and do this.”

What were some of the songs that you guys sang?

I know one of them very clearly was I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas. Because we had little kazoos for one of the verses. Which had to have just been so annoying. But we had them. That’s the one that sticks out.

“I want a hippopotamus for Christmas

Only a hippopotamus will do

Don’t want – “

Well and then the kazoo part would be same tune.

Did you learn that as part of your choir repertoire?

Yeah. We had a caroling book that they gave us. It was  odd when I think back on it, but we had set out – because there were concerts that the whole school did, and we were in this smaller that was still led by the choir director but we would go off and do little gigs at places. Like at a retirement home and stuff like that. We would just go and carol to them. So we had to memorize this book of songs, and it was all acapella.  That’s why we decided to do it because we didn’t even need any instruments and could just go out there and do it.

So caroling is something you had grown up around?

In a way, but it wasn’t even growing up around it so much as it was suddenly there in high school. Obviously I knew the songs, and I was aware of the songs when I was little. But I – I hadn’t ever done it as a kid. My family never went around caroling.

Did people come to your house?

No, no – so that’s why it was – it was very sudden in high school that we decided to do this. I mean it was brought  about by our teacher at first, but then we just decided we would have our fun with it and just do it. There were a lot of showboats in our high school choir Probably any choir – it comes with the territory.

 —

Informant started taking unexpected tangents, but I think this works collectively as an impression of the way the informant celebrated the winter holiday.

Christmas Routine

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 30, 2014
Primary Language: English

So – Christmas has always been one of my favorite holidays, not gonna lie. When I was a kid it was because of the presents, because I’m a very materialistic person. The family tradition was always – always the same. Christmas Eve what would happen is we’d go over to my grandmother’s house on my mother’s side. And meet with her family have have a very nice dinner. And then just open presents! And that was always the most fun because I have two aunts who always went all out and bought very expensive things, and my brothers and I were just thrilled. But then the better part and more heartwarming part always came the next morning because what would happen is my brothers and I would wake up at 6 am and to this day whenever I’m home I’m very adamant about us getting up at 6 am, even when my brothers go “Ahh I didn’t get enough sleep last night!” I’m like, “No, it’s happening.” We’d get up at 6 am, say “Hey mom and dad we’re up,” and while my brothers and I wait upstairs in our bedroom, my dad would go downstairs, turn on the Christmas tree lights, turn on Christmas music, just create a perfect holiday atmosphere. Then he’d turn on the camera and say “Ok boys, you can come on down,” and all of the videos we have of Christmas start out the same way – it’s our reaction shot of walking down the stairs and seeing the Christmas tree, and the presents underneath.

What else constitutes the ‘holiday atmosphere”?

I mean some – he usually wore a Santa hat, let’s see – I mean what comes to mind is just the Christmas tree, in that we have a – the theme of our Christmas tree is always the same, it’s toy based. So we have all sorts of toys hanging around the tree. There was a very specific – if you remember the dog Spot when you were really little –

See Spot Run.

Yeah, exactly. He was a little plush figure we’d put on the tree, and my brother Kevin was always just the biggest fan of Spot. And would sometimes just take him off the tree and hug him and cuddle with him, which was adorable. Besides that though, the breakfast afterwards was always delicious. French toast soaked in egg nog – perfect holiday breakfast. And then later that evening we’d go to my aunt’s house on my dad’s side. It was very nice – it was kind of the most formal part of the day because we had to be – my aunt is slightly strict, so we had to be very prim and proper. But it was still nice, we got to hang out with my aunt and my grandma, and we just got to share stories, what sort of presents we got – though they usually weren’t happy if they were related to video games in any way. Because we needed to be active and so on. That was pretty much the holiday.

Do you still partake in the holiday in this particular fashion?

Absolutely I do. I mean things have changed, Christmas Eve we used to go –

My brother’s kind of indifferent these days to Spot. But my grandma moved out of her old house so now we have Christmas at my house, which is very nice because there’ a lot less driving involved on Christmas eve. And then we kind of had a falling out with my aunt on my dad’s side, so now we just have a nice Christmas dinner at home alone. But that general scenario comes to mind.

You said the area you come from is a pretty Jewish area. Have you ever invited Jewish friends to come and celebrate with you?

No, unfortunately not. My parents were always pretty adamant that especially around the holidays it’s family time, so even recently my parents – well, this is more New Years, where there’ “Come on guys, let’s stay home and do family things” and I’m like “we have friends now, who drink and are fun.” So that’s – yeah, that’s pretty much what happens.”

So it’s pretty family-centric. Are there any community-wide things you would do? Or is it JUST family.

Pretty much just family.

Is that – does any of this – come from stuff that your parents did before?

A little bit, I mean yeah. On my mom’s side they would always celebrate Christmas the night before. Because they had a Catholic mass that day. That evening. And then I guess they’d come home early in the morning and open presents then. As for my dad, yeah – it was pretty much the exact scenario that my brothers and I experienced, where they’d get – they’d have their dad set everything up, create that atmosphere and all of them would come outside, open presents, and it was fun. But imagine it more 50’s style.

 

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Very very family-oriented and generationally defined – see the tradition being essentially the same as that of the informants parents (mashed together) and just being passed onward.