Tag Archives: Game

White Elephant Ritual

Text: “My family organizes a big white elephant on Christmas Day that everyone is involved in. Everyone brings a present and then everyone exchanges it.”

Context:

The Informant is a student at the University of Southern California, speaking with admiration and nostalgic reminiscence as these memories are recounted.

“My extended family on my dad’s side mostly live in New Jersey, and they’ve grown up there. And every Christmas we spend Christmas with them. We have like a designated path where first we go to like this aunt and uncle’s house for the morning, then we hit like this aunt and uncle’s house for dinner. But at the first place, we do the white elephant. And the significance of this is that my family is huge. My dad has seven siblings, so there’s a lot of people involved in this white elephant. And it kind of takes up the entirety of the first half of the day. And these items become recurring things that people will just have with them whenever we see each other.  And they’ll like, kind of have memories from years before, like, oh, remember when this person got this. So it actually is like an event of Christmas. And often times it’ll be like references to family jokes or just like family things. Like my family watches It’s a Wonderful Life every single Christmas. And then one Christmas people got Bedford balls and It’s a Wonderful Life shirts, just like so interesting and niche. I think as I’ve grown older, I liked it a lot more because, I’ve felt a lot more part of my family. And it feels like we’re reinforcing that we’re all part of a group and that we’re actively keeping it alive through traditions, not just seeing each other, but caring about each other, like wanting to have individual connections with each other. That’s a family. I think white elephant can be fairly common, especially with friend groups. I have heard of other people doing this tradition, but I don’t know if people do it as consistently. Like this is my family’s white elephant.  When people are kind of thinking ahead of time of what to bring like what has been mentioned, what has been joked about over the past year at family gatherings, like, yeah, it’s very topical to the year kind of like the past experiences of what’s been happening. So it feels like a recap family thing. I think maybe when I was younger, I wasn’t super aware of it. And then as I became older, yeah, I think we’ve been doing it like every single year.”

Analysis: This white elephant tradition is an example of a ritual that is performed in celebration of a holiday. It is considered a ritual because of its nature of being performed at a certain time, planned, commemorating Christmas, among the same group of people. There is little distinction between the participants as audience and performer because each person takes on each role at certain times. The white elephant ritual specifically is an example of people having ritual license, where they act in ways that are not normally acceptable. This can be seen in how participants are allowed to steal others’ gifts and give ‘gag’ gifts that hold no real value. Despite the white elephant ritual being a widely known game especially in the U.S., many families and groups like the Informant’s can find personal significance in performing the ritual.

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board — Memorate

Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 2, 2023
Primary Language: English

Text

“My mom told me this story of when she was playing ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board’ during a high school slumber party. Right as they began to lift a girl, she had a seizure. It was the first time she ever had one, and she was later diagnosed with epilepsy. 

“Since they all went to a Catholic high school and their parents were devout Catholics, the sleepover was immediately disbanded, perhaps out of fear they had conjured some sort of demonic spirit or something. Ever since hearing this story as a kid, I have never participated in those sorts of activities at sleepovers.”

Context

SR is a 20 year-old college student from Thousand Oaks, CA. Her family is Catholic and has Italian roots.

‘Light as a feather, stiff as a board’ is a levitation game played at girls’ slumber parties. It is a sort of ritual that embodies the liminal space between life and death as one girl is chosen to ‘die’ and the others must lift her up. There are certain things to be recited that supposedly make the girl’s body light enough to be lifted or rise on its own, depending on versions of the game.

SR’s mother told her this story to warn her against playing the game. Since the ritual attempts to draw upon some dark magic or power, a Catholic family would not want their kids engaging in such practices.

Analysis

This story is an example of a memorate, a personal experience that gets interpreted into an existing legendary structure. SR noted the Catholic upbringings of all the girls at the sleepover, meaning they all had a degree of belief in the devil and demonic forces; perhaps they had been told stories of possessions and exorcisms as this is something commonly done in Catholic teaching against the devil.

Thus, when something scary happened to their friend, this belief system offered a framework through which to understand the experience. 

This game being performed in the context of a sleepover highlights how belief is a social process. SR’s mother played the game in high school, a liminal time when a child is beginning the transition into adulthood and thus experimenting with belief. Legend questing/tripping is something done within peer groups at this time in an attempt to see if a legend is true.

Many beliefs are acquired from social sources in narrative form. Thus, SR hearing this story from her own mother makes it especially memorable and believable. Regardless of the truth value of the story, the legend is strong enough to discourage SR from doing any ‘legend tripping’ of her own, as she said she never participated in these activities after hearing her mom’s story.

Joota Chupai – Shoe Stealing

Nationality: USA
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: California, USA
Performance Date: 2/21/23
Primary Language: English

ZN describes a prank/game that is commonly played at weddings in their culture. They are a second generation immigrant from Pakistan who lives in the Bay Area. Their family is Muslim.

ZN.) So, when a couple gets married – a bride and groom – the bride’s family, usually like the younger siblings or cousins of the bride, will steal the groom’s shoes and then they’ll go hide them somewhere and the groom’s family has to try and get the shoes, but they never do. And then the groom has to buy the shoes back from the bride’s family because they’re like, ‘oh you’re taking away or our sister or cousin,’ or whatever. It’s like, ‘we’re taking your shoes’ and then the groom is like, ‘I’ll pay you a lot of money for the shoes.’ So, then It’s like a huge, like, bargaining thing and the groom will be like, ‘Oh how about like $200’ and then the bride’s family will go like, ‘No we want $1000.’ The groom will be like, ‘No, but I’m broke. I won’t have any money to pay for my new wife’s food,’ and they’re like, ‘no give us more money.’ Anyway, so then they usually settle on, like, $500 or something, and then with our family, the entire family the of the bride will go to like Ihop after the wedding and we’ll spend it all on Ihop, like, pancakes and hot chocolate

Me.) Where do you usually see this? Is it your family specifically or have you seen any version of this at other weddings for the shoe stealing?

ZN.) I don’t know if it’s a South Asian, or maybe just Muslim Pakistani, thing but the shoe stealing is like a common thing.

This seems to be a practice of the game Joota Chupai, literally translating to ‘Shoe Hiding’. This wedding tradition is most often observed by Desi groups (south Asians) in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other surrounding countries. In this game the bride’s family will steal the groom’s shoes, which in Hindu culture, they must have to leave or enter the wedding venue. The groom’s family will try to find the shoes to get them back to the groom, usually to no avail, and then the bride’s family will demand money to return the shoes to the groom. This tradition allows the two families to have some fun during long wedding ceremonies and brings them closer together through competition. Even though the tradition seems to stem from Hinduism, it seems that Muslims from the surrounding regions picked up the tradition as well, showing cultural mixing within the area despite religious tensions. JK, another South Asian individual hailing from Gujarat, India had this to say about the game:

JK.) It’s played all over India. Everyone does it at weddings, so it’s not a Hindu or Muslim thing, it’s everyone.

Kangaroo Court

Nationality: USA
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: California,CA
Performance Date: 2/23/23
Primary Language: English

NM was a Boy Scout throughout their childhood, and this game came from their trips.

NM.) On our Catalina hike, because it was a 3-day weekend, we would do this game called kangaroo court where you would accuse other scouts of, like, some ridiculous thing like, “This dude is a capybara in disguise and is secretly plotting to take over the world!” Then, if you were accused, you’d have to get someone to be your lawyer and they would have to defend you. They would bring up different things you did during the day. People would set this up during the hike and make people say things that they would bring up during kangaroo court.

The boy scouts have many games, pranks, and traditions, and this seems to be one of them. This sits somewhere between a prank and a game because people would set up verbal traps that they would later spring on their defendant. By having a ‘lawyer’ defend the defendant, this game becomes community fun instead of direct opposition because that ‘lawyer’ would have to remember their experiences with the ‘defendant’

Scuba Diver Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: College student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 2/14/2023
Primary Language: English

D is 19 years old, she’s a college student. She moved to California for high school, and has a large history with camping and hiking. She shared this trail game riddle she learned at summer camp in North Carolina when she was 11 or 12, though she’s also heard it multiple times while hiking. 

“You could call them detective riddles, but they’re all in the same genre of: someone presents a scenario and then the one who’s trying to figure it out is asking questions about the scenario until they get more and more details and they figure out the answer to the scenario. This one is known as the scuba diver riddle. The scenario is “a man is found in the middle of a burned down forest head to toe in scuba gear. There’s no trace of anyone else around him, no trace of how he got there, what happened?” From there people ask questions like “Is he wet? Yes or no. Is he alive?” Sometimes it takes 20 minutes, I’ve seen up to three days, it’s a great thing to play when you’re in the backcountry and really bored. The eventual answer is that the man is someone who was scuba diving, there was a forest fire miles and miles away from sea, and helicopter crews trying to stop the wild fire were collecting water in huge nets to carry over to the forest from the ocean. They picked up this scuba diver, dropped him on the forest fire, he died on impact.” 

This was a new brand of riddle that I hadn’t heard because it seems to be specific to those who go hiking or are out in nature for a long time. It seems like an excellent way to pass a lot of time. It’s really interesting how groups that spend a lot of time doing something repetitive like walking up a trail or camping will get creative to engage their minds over that long period of time. I wonder how far back games like these go. I imagine games like this have existed for a long time, because before cars people often had to walk very far to get to their destination if they were traveling somewhere new, like soldiers marching or people going on the Oregon Trial. I imagine humans have been creating these games for a long time, and they’ve morphed to suit modern audiences, as this riddle is terminus post quem helicopters and scuba gear existing. The informant also said that this riddle was used by adults to frustrate and keep kids busy, because kids like to ask a lot of questions. It seems like a good way to quench kid’s curiosity, because kids are endlessly curious.