Tag Archives: Family tradition

New Year’s Eve Tradition

Nationality: American
Primary language: English
Age: 49
Occupation: Stay-at-home mom
Residence: Mercer Island, WA

Text

Each year on New Year’s Eve, one minute before midnight, SD and her family would all grab wooden spoons and pots and pans. They would go outside on their deck and, at midnight, began to bang the spoons on the pots and pans loudly. As they did this, they shouted “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” very loudly. They did this for around one minute before going inside.

Context

SD first remembers participating in this tradition with her father, mother, and siblings when she was about 7. Her father taught this to her and she believes it’s something he learned from his mother or grandmother. SD has perpetuated this tradition and now does it each year with her husband and son. She’s not sure what this tradition means. She finds it really funny and it brings her joy because it’s super obnoxious to neighbors, but you kind of have to laugh.

Analysis

This family tradition literally rings in the New Year. I think that this tradition serves as a way to celebrate the beginning of the new year with energy and joy, perhaps something which the participants wish to bring with them into the next year. This tradition feels as if it belongs in the “play space” spoken about in Chapter 5 of Oring’s Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. The author of this chapter, Jay Mechling, notes that the play space allows people to do and say things they wouldn’t normally be able to in everyday society (98). I would argue that the minutes between the old year and the new year are very much a “liminal space,” one in which tons of different folk groups are participating in different traditions. The laws of reality/society sometimes don’t feel as if they apply in liminal spaces, giving them special qualities. While loud screaming and banging pots and pans would normally be grounds for a noise complaint, it isn’t in the liminal space of New Year’s Eve. This family tradition flaunts this, playing with social boundaries in a new way. Additionally, since it is so loud, it invites others to join in the celebration. While other family traditions can be very private and personal, SD’s is loud and in-your-face. I believe this may be a way of extending the joy and silliness of the tradition to others, inviting neighbors and everyone who can hear to have some of the good energy the tradition sends out. This belief is further reinforced by the cry, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!”, which is directed at those all around.

Christmas Ornament Tradition

Nationality: American
Primary language: English
Age: 18-22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA

Text

Before Christmas every year, each person in EB’s immediate family buys an ornament that represents their year. For example, when she graduated high school, her ornament was a graduation cap. There was one year where she played soccer all year, so she got a soccer themed ornament. After EB and her family decorate the Christmas tree, they all get their new ornaments and hang them together as a family.

Context

EB isn’t sure when her family started this tradition, but knows her parents have a wedding ornament to represent the year they got married. She thinks this might be the start of it, but it’s possible that her mom did this with her family before that. EB believes that the ornaments represent the passage of time. The tradition makes her happy and maybe a little nostalgic, especially when she looks at ornaments from when she was young (simpler times). EB thinks that having all the ornaments on the tree together seems to represent their collective experience as a family and what they’ve gone through together. It’s a tree that celebrates accomplishments and what they’ve done with their lives so far. Doing this together shows that they go through life together as a family and are celebrating each other’s accomplishments.

Analysis

I support EB’s analysis of her family’s tradition, especially in regards to the passage of time. “Rites of passage” and change are important in all communities, and one extremely common instance of this is the transition into a new year. Christmas is the last major holiday for families to come together before New Year’s Eve, and as such, it offers up an opportunity for reflection on the year. Boiling all of one’s experiences down into a single object–in this case an ornament–can help people quantify their experiences, understand them, and represent them. For example, in our in-class exercise where everyone brought a tourist object, many people expressed the object’s importance in terms of how it reminded them of a happy trip/experience. In the same way, EB’s family’s ornaments serve this purpose, but instead of reminding them of one trip, they remind them of a whole year! Furthermore, as EB mentioned, this exercise brings them together as a family unit. They’re all living their own years, but they can come together and celebrate them as a whole by partaking in this tradition together. This reemphasizes the importance of their folk group (a family unit) while still celebrating individual experience and change.

Family Christmas Cookie Making

Main Piece

“Every Christmas, our house becomes a ‘candy factory’ – at some point when I was growing up, my mom found recipes for chocolate fudge, peanut butter toffee fudge, and peppermint bark, tweaked some of them so they didn’t have quite as many sticks of butter and cups of sugar, and started making them to give to neighbors and family. My dad started bringing them to work to give to his coworkers too, and now it’s something everyone looks forward to getting from us each year. My brother and I started helping make them pretty early on, at least since I was in eighth grade, and it’s become a key Christmas tradition – responsibility, even – to share with our mom every year.”

Interpretation

Informant’s Interpretation: This tradition holds primary relevance to informant as a family tradition. She likes to spend the time with her mom, but notes that since the whole thing puts a stress on her mom, helping can sometimes “feel more like a duty than a fun cozy Christmas tradition.” However, she notes that she still heavily associates this with how her family celebrates Christmas and thus enjoys it.

Personal Interpretation: I find this to be a classic example of a family Christmas tradition–particularly so because other families recognize it as such and come to enforce the idea of the tradition from a slightly-external perspective. While associated with a religious holiday, I don’t see any particular direct connection to Christian tradition other than perhaps the origins of the types of cookies. That said, it feels pretty removed from any religious context and has more to do with the time of year and family-centric association than anything else.

Background

Informant is a 21 year old college student raised in Rancho Bernardo, California. She is female-presenting, white, and of European descent.

Presenting Christmas

Text:
The informant’s family opens all presents from non-immediate family on Christmas eve, while the presents from immediate family are saved for Christmas Day. On Christmas day these presents are only opened after the informant’s mother reads the Christmas story aloud.

Context:
The informant thinks that the presents of immediate family being saved for Christmas is because it’s more exciting to see people open gifts that you gave them and hear what they think than it is to see them open presents from other people, so it’s saving the most fun for the most special day. As for the Christmas story reading, he thinks that’s to prioritize and reinforce that it’s the celebration of Christianity and Jesus’ birth, not just a random holiday.

Analysis:
I think the informant is correct with all of his analysis, but that there is an extra layer to saving the immediate family’s presents for Christmas day, and that is to emphasize the importance of one’s family a little more than any other friends or relatives.

Family Jeer

Text:

“Every party needs a pooper, and that’s why we invited you.”

Context:

This jeer (or insult) is a part of the informant’s family lore. Within his family, this jeer is very well known, because members of the informant’s family often say it to each other to tease each other, implying that the recipient of the jeer is a party pooper. When used in the context of his family lore, the jeer is not actually meant to insult or slight its recipient, but is instead meant as a loving tease shared between loved ones.

Analysis:

While this insult is not yelled in a crowd setting at an opposing team, it is much like others that are very commonly used as teasing insults among loved ones. Another example of an insult of the same nature is when someone holds their hand above their friend’s head and says “This is a brain eater. Do you know what it’s doing? Starving!”

Insults like these are meant to bring families and friends closer together rather than to actually put them down or start an argument. After all, it is unlikely that someone who truly wanted to insult/start an argument with anyone else would actually use one of these insults to do so, as they are much more silly than actually hurtful. Instead, they are used to tease someone in a fun way and spread laughter among a group of people who already have some degree of love between them. This insult is also a very interesting example of our inclination to bond so much through teasing and sarcasm, as I am sure many other families have some version, if not many, of these insults that they share lovingly.