Tag Archives: ham

Golden Eggs, Ham, and the “Easter Feeling”

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Every Easter, our entire extended family gathers at my grandmother’s house. There was never a formal reason–my grandma told me, “It just sort of ended up that way.” What began as a casual decision eventually solidified into tradition.

My Grandma recalled one of her favorite parts, “you kids would sprint through the backyard and living room for the Easter egg hunt. I loved it…” “…I always laughed at the fact that even though there were dozens of eggs filled with chocolate, you were all focused on the same thing: the ‘golden eggs…’” The golden eggs are indeed funny, there were always three of them–shiny, oversized plastic eggs that each held a five-dollar bill. We, as kids, didn’t really understand the value of five dollars back then. What mattered was the rarity. The golden eggs were sacred. We fought over them like little archaeologists hunting treasure, more excited by the idea of “winning” than by what was inside.

Later in the day, we’d all sit down for Easter dinner, always centered around a glazed ham. My grandma told me that it came from her father–“He always made a ham for Easter.” What she added, without ever needing to say so out loud, was the practice of everyone bringing something to the table. As the guest list grew each year, so did the variety of dishes. The potluck-style meal grew naturally out of necessity, but it came to define our Easter just as much as the egg hunt.

This last Easter was different. There was no egg hunt–there hasn’t been for a few years now–and the gathering wasn’t at Grandma’s house. Her home was damaged in the LA fires, and fewer people were able to come. Still, my grandma told me, “It still felt like Easter… There was family. There was laughter. And there was ham.”

Context

This tradition was expanded upon to me by my grandmother, who reflected fondly on years of hosting Easter at her home. She admitted that it wasn’t originally her intention to become the family’s “Easter matriarch”–it just happened. Over time, her home became the default gathering spot, and rituals formed naturally around that consistency.

She described the joy of watching us as children during the egg hunts, laughing at how seriously we took the hunt for the golden eggs. Though she couldn’t recall when or why that part of the tradition started, it clearly took on a life of its own. The money inside the eggs was never the point–it was the prestige, the shimmer, the chase. Something she[and I] looks back on now with warm nostalgia.

The dinner evolved more deliberately. She explained that her father always served ham on Easter, and when she began hosting, she continued that tradition. Over time, guests began bringing dishes of their own. She never asked them to–it just became understood. In her words, “It was never about telling people what to bring. It just made sense.” The gathering grew, the table expanded, and Easter became an informal but deeply rooted expression of our family’s thread that ties us all together.

Even after being unable to enter her home[thankfully not burnt down], and despite the changing logistics and attendance, she expressed a deep certainty: the “Easter feeling” had nothing to do with eggs or décor. It was about presence, food, and connection.

Analysis

This entry illustrates how informal rituals, when repeated and emotionally reinforced, evolve into meaningful family folklore. What began as a loose gathering became tradition through consistency and emotional investment. The Easter egg hunt, the golden eggs, and the communal meal are all ritualized behaviors that define Easter–not by religious observance, but by shared memory and performance.

The “golden egg” tradition, though not rooted in ancient folklore, mirrors folkloric patterns–assigning symbolic value to a rare object and embedding it in a playful competition. As with many children’s traditions, the meaning wasn’t in the literal reward, but in the emotional significance, the role-playing, and the storytelling that followed. It reflects how children interact with tradition through symbolism, scarcity, and status–concepts that resonate across many cultural customs.

Similarly, the evolution of the Easter meal highlights adaptive ritual: how tradition grows through informal negotiation. The potluck-style dinner wasn’t dictated–it arose organically, responding to shifting family size and resources. This mirrors how many communal folk practices begin: organically, in response to need, but later sustained by emotional investment.

The somewhat loss of the family home due to the LA fires introduces another layer: how tradition persists even in the absence of its physical setting. My grandmother’s insistence that “it still felt like Easter” reveals a truth about folklore–it’s less about place or object, and more about feeling, continuity, and presence. Even stripped of its original setting, the tradition held. And that endurance–the “Easter feeling”–is the most folkloric element of all.

Thanksgiving Ham

Text: “My family always buys pre-sliced ham from our local grocery shop on Thanksgiving, and it’s really good with the special glaze that it comes with. It’s like this honey pineapple type glaze that’s sweet and then you combine the sweet with the savory from the ham, and it’s just an amazing concoction.”

Context:

Informant is a freshman at the University of Southern California studying human biology, originally from St. Louis, Missouri from Nigerian descent. We speak alongside a few of her other friends, and she carries a somewhat sarcastic, comedic tone.

“It’s a classic Thanksgiving staple in our family. And I honestly prefer eating the ham over turkey any day anytime. We began doing it when we moved into my new house which is my current house back at home. So probably 2013, 2014 ish. I think we do it because it’s way easier to prepare than a Turkey, and it tastes better. I’ve heard of other people doing it, but not for Thanksgiving more for Christmas. This tradition makes me feel so excited to wake up on Thanksgiving morning. I can smell the sweet, savory aroma of the ham tickle my nostrils. Wow.”

Analysis: Having this specific dish on a certain holiday is an example of a ritual. It is a ritual which commemorates something, namely the early days of colonized America. It is performed within a certain group of people at a specific time of year. It is also an example of ritual inversion in how modern folk tradition places ham on the menu for Christmas and turkey on the menu for Thanksgiving, but the informant’s family reverses these traditions. They are able to invert the normal social rules because they have claimed their own celebration as their own time for traditions and rituals.

New Jersey Taylor Ham

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA; New Jersey
Performance Date: 4/29/15
Primary Language: English

The informant and I were having breakfast one day, when he mentioned how much he missed Taylor ham from New Jersey. I asked him to tell me more about Taylor ham.

“So there’s this breakfast food and its called Taylor ham and it only exists in four counties in all of New Jersey and everywhere else in New Jersey it’s called pork roll, because that’s the generic version of Taylor ham, and in New York City and Pennsylvania it’s also called pork roll, and no one else in the United States knows what it is, and it’s amazing, and every morning a New Jerseyan wakes up, and they are like ‘I want a Taylor ham on egg and cheese and everything bagel at salt pepper and ketchup’ and they go to the bagel shop they get that… this guy named Taylor just decided to have this cut of ham.”

A peculiar aspect of the informant’s account of Taylor ham is his perspective that New Jersey has the “original” Taylor ham, and that other parts of New Jersey and New York call it something else. It would be interesting to find out if these other people consider “pork roll” the original version of the ham, and consider “Taylor” ham some quirky name that a small weird group of people in New Jersey use to refer to pork roll. Clearly, Taylor ham is a point of pride for my informant, and something that he shares the knowledge of with some fellow New Jerseyans.

Thanksgiving Ham

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student, Part time facilities attendant at on campus gym
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/27/13
Primary Language: English

In the following, my informant recounts how her family traditionally has Ham on Thanksgiving rather than the more traditional Turkey:

We always have Ham for Thanksgiving, always, I mean, yeah, its not a Thanksgiving without ham. Turkey? Not turkey. We’ll have some turkey,  but we always have ham because my great, my grandma, or my Nana on my dad’s side, she cooked the best honey baked ham, oh my gosh, and um , we loved it when we were little, and, so each Thanksgiving she would make it for us, and we’d always have that.

The fact that my informant and her family continue to celebrate Thanksgiving with ham rather than turkey, even after, as she informed me, her grandmother, who made the ham, has died, shows that they do it in remembrance of her. My informant told me that for her family Thanksgiving is a way of not only celebrating the family currently there, but the family which either is absent or has died, and eating ham is a way of remembering not only her grandmother, but all the family members she once shared a Thanksgiving with.

The Roast

Nationality: American
Age: ~70
Occupation: Retiree
Residence: Altadena, CA
Performance Date: April 8, 2012
Primary Language: English

The informant recounted the legend on Easter in the context of telling family stories. She acknowledges that it isn’t specifically tied to her family but could be from anyone’s family.

Story:
A mother is teaching her daughter how to cook a ham, and when she cuts the end off, and puts it aside, and puts the ham in the oven and bakes it. [The informant mimes these actions as she tells the story.]

And the daughter says: ‘Why did you do that?’

And she says: ‘Oh, I don’t know, because my mother did.’

So, the daughter goes to the grandma and she says: ‘Grandma, why did you do that?’

And she says: ‘I don’t know, because my mother did.’

And so, she goes to the great-grandma and she says: ‘Grandma, why did you do that?’

And she says: ‘Cuz I had a small pan!’

[Everyone at the table chuckles.]

Me: And when would you tell that story?

Informant: To your granddaughter? I don’t know. When you’re eating ham? [laughs] When someone asks “why?”.

 

Analysis:

This exists both as a general funny story to tell to the family but also as a piece of meta-folklore explaining how traditions come to be. It also follows the rule of three from Olrik’s epic laws. The daughter has to ask three mothers to get her answer about the tradition.