Tag Archives: christmas

The Angry Elf

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA; Ukiah, CA
Performance Date: 4/23/15
Primary Language: English

While talking about family traditions, my friend started talking about a peculiar custom her family does for Christmas.

Informant: “The angry elf comes on Christmas Eve and, um, he like, he’ll hit you with a soft present. It’s usually pajamas wrapped in newspaper, and like it’ll be when you’re not looking, you’ll get hit behind the head and… one time my cousin Lucas like he saw the elf and he jumped out the window to go find the elf. He like, dive rolled out the window. He opened the window to go catch the elf. He never caught the elf.”

Collector: “But like, obviously someone…”

Informant: “Yeah, as I grew up I figured it was my mom, and my brothers. And we still do it like, well, the elf came! And like, I’ll do it to my parents now. Its fun”

Collector: “Where does your mom come from? Like, does she throw it through the window?”

Informant: “No, she wasn’t actually outside the window but like when my cousin chased after the elf, he was like putting on a whole show, like ‘I think he ran outside the window!’”

“Oh, I see”

Informant: “It was intense”

Collector: “Is this something that just happens within your family, or have you heard of anyone else doing this?”

Informant: “I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this”

Collector: “Do you know how it started?”

Informant: “I don’t. Probably when the three kids were there. It was me and my two brothers. It was all like, all my house. Like everyone just put on this big show. Probably the idea of elves came from the Waldorf School that they went to, because you leave your shoes out, and then on Christmas eve the elves fill your shoes with candy. I think that’s a German tradition.”

Collector: “And you’ve done this ever since you can remember? This angry elf thing?”

Informant: “Mhm”

It’s interesting to see that different families have different Christmas gift-giving traditions. Some have Santa Claus, others elves, and others have both. It’s also interesting to see how families continue traditions of magical gift-giving beings long after their kids have grown up and no longer seriously believe in these beings, in order to continue a family tradition.

Christmas Casserole

Nationality: Irish/American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Las Vegas
Performance Date: 04/24/15
Primary Language: English
Language: none

The informant is an 18-year old college freshman at USC majoring in environmental studies and geology. She is of Irish and English descent, and when she is not at USC lives in Las Vegas with her parents and two siblings. I asked her about what her family does to celebrate Christmas. She said although her family is “not very religious,” they do have a Christmas ritual they do each year.

 

Informant: “I can tell you what I do for Christmas, I guess. So, we always, in the morning…Well, the night before we have to make a casserole. I know it sounds disgusting.

Interviewer: “What’s in the casserole?”

Informant: “I can ask my mom for the recipe.” [Recipe provided beneath interview.]

Interviewer: “Did she learn it from anyone, or was it a recipe from a book?”

Informant: “Both my parents learned it from their parents. We have to make the casserole the night before. And so then in the morning, we’ll wake up…so all the kids have to stay upstairs and we have this landing you can look over, but we aren’t allowed to look over it or go downstairs until my dad has his video camera and then he records us all coming down the stairs together. We go in a circle after our presents are sorted and one person opens and then the next, etc. We go through the whole thing until everyone is done, and one of my parents will put the egg casserole in. Once it’s ready, we eat that, and we just go and play with our presents. It’s so good, it’s like breakfast food, called egg casserole. It’s so good.”

 

 

“Recipe:

6 eggs

2 pieces of bread (need to rip apart in small bite sized pieces)

1 pound of hot sausage

1 cup of mile

2 pinches of salt

2 pinches of pepper

Dry mustard (No exact amount, but around the same amount as the salt and pepper)

 

Brown the sausage. Combine all ingredients in a bowl.

 

Place in baking dish over night.

 

Next morning—preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook for 45 minutes. It might need an extra 15 mins. Closer to one hour.”

 

Thoughts:

My informant told me that it was a casserole passed down to her mom, as opposed to some other treat, because in Ireland—where her family is from (my informant described herself as “very Irish”)—they were very poor and as there was a lack of food, casseroles were something that could be thrown together using whatever they had. I thought it was super interesting that my informant perked up when she talked about he casserole and said multiple times how good it was. Food is fuel, but it is much more to people. There are emotional connections to food—memories of specific times or holidays or family members associated with certain foods—and that is passed down through families from one generation to the next is one example of this importance.

Wooden Shoes for Sinterklaas

Nationality: American/ Dutch
Age: 66
Occupation: Retired Lawyer
Residence: LA, CA
Performance Date: 04/05/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Dutch, Spanish

The informant is a 66-year old mother, step-mother, former poverty-lawyer, property manager/owner, and is involved in many organizations and non profits. She was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was four years old. She grew up in California, where she also attended college and law school. She lived in the suburbs of Chicago for a short while with her husband and family, and now they live in Pacific Palisades, California.

 

Informant: “St. Nicholas Day there is like December 7th or 8th. It was a secular holiday. I mean everybody, all the Jewish people (all 10% of them, the few left after the war), we all celebrated St. Nicholas day. So, your dad is in the Netherlands with us on St. Nicholas Day, we call it Sinterklaas there, and he looks out the window and says, ‘Oh yes, really secular holiday.’ There’s the St. Nick, whose you know, this cardinal. White haired cardinal all decked out. And then, Swarte Piet, which is Black Pete was a little black guy with him. On St. Nicholas Day in Holland we always put out our wooden shoes. We’d put out the wooden shoes because then they’d be filled with chocolate. They would do it really literally though. So if you were “bad” that year, you would actually get coal in your wooden shoe. Not like they do here in America with the stockings and presents. Even in the United States early on we would always get packages from the Netherlands before St. Nicholas Day.

 

Interviewer: “So could it be any shoes?”

 

Informant: “A wooden shoe! Instead of stockings it was the wooden shoes. If you were a bad kid, then St. Nicholas would put coal in your shoe as opposed to, you know, chocolates.”

 

Analysis: I remember in class we talked about most Christmas traditions being based on older Pagan festivals, and many religious holidays’ links with earth-cycle rituals. St. Nicholas Day being a secular ritual in the Netherlands could be an example of a Christmas tradition’s origins being based in pagan tradition, or it could also be an effect of Christianization of the area where the Netherlands is now.

 

The figure of Black Pete, or Swarte Piet as he is called in Dutch, really fascinates me. I did some research on him and found that there has actually been a good deal of controversy surrounding “Santa’s Black-faced Helper”, as a writer for NPR refers to the figure. It’s not just that there is a statue of a little black man next to the more favorably-sculpted Saint; each year, there is a Sinterklaas parade, during which several individuals in black face dance around as St. Nicholas’s helpers.

 

There are different stories as to why Swarte Piet is swarte. Some say it is because he was once the devil – this in and of itself is problematic in the context of blackface minstrelcy—that black is associated with the devil goes to support racial supremacy theories. Some say that Swarte Piet was a slave of Sinterklaas. Others say Piet is just dirty from sliding down too many chimneys helping St. Nicholas.

 

Regardless of how Piet became Swarte, in recent years there have been more and more people upset by the blackface tradition associated with Sinterklaas parades. It will be interesting to see how the controversy plays out. As of now, the Dutch courts have refused to intervene.

 

For more information on blackface in Sinterklaas celebrations see: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/12/01/367704573/santas-black-faced-helpers-are-under-fire-in-the-netherlands

A Tree for the New Year

Nationality: Russian / American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: LA, CA
Performance Date: 04/28/15
Primary Language: Russian
Language: English, French, some hebrew

The informant is a 21-year old student attending the University of California Berkeley. She is majoring in Media Studies and Journalism with a minor in Hebrew. She grew up in West Los Angeles with her two parents, immigrants from the Soviet Union. The following is what she shared with me about the Soviet way of celebrating New Year’s Eve.

 

Informant: “The Soviets made New Years the new holiday. They weren’t allowed to celebrate Christmas anymore, so they went around the rules and celebrated the secular holiday instead. They had a pine tree and Father snow (he was instead of Santa Claus). My family celebrates Soviet New Years still. A lot of us immigrated here—my mom and dad and both of their siblings and all of their kids. And my grandparents. So every New Year’s when I was growing up we would have a big family gathering with a tree—even though we are Jewish, I know it’s weird, but it’s not religious at all. It’s really just like a holdover from the Soviet Union. I got presents and my dad and grandpa always sang these long, hard-to-understand Russian songs.”

 

Thoughts:

This reminds me of Santeria, a syncretic religion in the Americas, centered around Yoruba-mythology and belief. When those who believed in Yoruba mythology were forced to convert to Catholocism, they began worshipping the Catholic Saints instead of the Yoruba Gods, at least in appearance. Rather, it seemed as though they were following along with the new rules imposed on them, but instead they were practicing their religion in disguise. The syncrasy of the religion came about, but the religion seems far more blended to outsiders than it is in practice.

People in the Soviet Union being prohibited from celebrating Christmas of other Christian holidays was a part of the Soviet anti religious campaign for state atheism. Given how much weight belief holds for many people and how so many customs, practices, and rituals are grounded in belief, it is unrealistic to extricate it from people.

 

Traditional Czech Christmas meals and cookies

Nationality: Czech
Age: 77
Occupation: Retired Antropologist
Residence: Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: 4/13/2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Czech

*Collector Note: The Czech Republic, previously known as Czechoslovakia, which was a part of the Kingdom of Bohemia before that, was primarily a Catholic nation, and as of such the majority population would not eat meat on Fridays in keeping with their religious beliefs.

Informant: “Around Christmas time, people in the Czech Republic had a couple of special meals that they would prepare. One that I can think of were dumplings with different fruits inside of them that were usually served on meatless Fridays for supper. These dumplings were a big thing in Central European culture. They were normally served with cottage cheese and melted butter. They were sweet, but they were often served as main dishes like crepes. My grandmother made them a lot, and they were typically easy to make. They were just made out of Flour, water, and fruit. Otherwise, around Christmas, Czech people were big on fancy cookies and deserts. My grandmother and aunt used to make a couple dozen kinds of cookies for Christmas. One of the main ones were Kolacky, which were round pastries made with cream cheese, butter, flour, and fruit fillings like prunes or apricot. Sometimes we would make them with poppyseed. Other cookies we made were Angel Wings, which were sort of a combination of more traditional Czech cookies and other [Central European] culture. Vanilla or Walnut crescents were a big special one. We would make gingerbread cookies like gingersnaps. There was one type of Christmas Bread called Vanocka, which was a sweet bread formed like a big braid, which would have dried fruit, raisins, and orange slices inside of it. They usually had almonds in it as well. Czechs were always really great bakers”

The informant is a 77 year old retired anthropologist living in Portland Oregon. Her grandparents immigrated to the United States from the Kingdom of Bohemia (in the modern day Czech Republic) in the 1890’s to escape the economic turmoil within the country in that time period. She was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and studied anthropology at Stanford University, during which time she became interested in learning more about the traditions of her heritage. She has on several occasions traveled to the Czech republic to visit relatives there.

Collector Analysis: This is a pretty straightforward interpretation of a widely spread tradition of making special foods and desserts for the Christmas Season. As an interesting side note, one of the conditions that the informant had for sharing this story was that the collector could not post the actual recipes for any of the cookies beyond simply a list of the general ingredients, as the recipes are apparently a family secret. All of the cookies sampled by the collector were, in the collector’s opinion, delicious.

Kolachy, a traditional Czech Christmas cookie

Kolachy, a traditional Czech Christmas cookie