Tag Archives: holiday

Hunting Trolls

Background: Informant has a Norwegian background from his fathers’s side and was raised being told about these Norwegian traditions and holidays, and this anecdote was told to me over a FaceTime call.

Informant: We would have a special toll hunt on the seventeenth of May… or syttende mai. Kind of like an easter egg hunt but trolls.

Me: Why did you hunt trolls?

Informant: Umm… it’s because trolls have a negative connotation, like how you’re supposed to clean your house in Chinese tradition on Chinese New Year to get out the bad luck… for us it was trolls.

Me: Did you get a prize for finding the trolls?

Informant: Yeah, we would get rewarded in chocolate.

Thoughts: Syttende mai in Norway is also known as Constitution Day, which is an official public holiday throughout the country. Essentially, it’s a country-wide party—people dress up in traditional costumes, with a lot of parades and drinking and ice cream. Syttende mai is not celebrated in any large way outside of Norway, as it would be like celebrating the Fourth of July as an Irish person—it just doesn’t really make sense to. It’s interesting to me how the informant’s mother brought together various folklores in order to give her children meaning on syttende mai as children born and raised in America. Trolls in Norway are seen to be creatures that are evil and dangerous, and beings that belong in the wilderness, not by the home, so there is even meaning behind the act of hunting trolls in Norwegian folklore, especially since the informant was rewarded for finding the trolls.

Santa Lucia

Background: Informant has a Norwegian background from his fathers’s side and was raised being told about these Norwegian traditions and holidays, and this anecdote was told to me in person.

Informant: It’s a Swedish tradition, it’s like mid-December. Saint Lucia was a martyr and her name is after lux, the Latin word for light. The Santa Lucia celebration is a celebration of light in mid-December when it’s really dark in the Arctic in Scandinavia. You sing this song about her and then you walk down the aisle and everyone carries candles and little lights. 

My informant sung a portion of the song as well for me.

Thoughts: It’s interesting what exactly is the most meaningful to different cultures in different parts of the year. For instance, in Scandinavia, it’s dark almost every hour of the day in the depths of winter, and it makes sense that Scandinavian people would want to celebrate light in the darkness. It’s also interesting to me how many Scandinavian countries have so much in common culturally—even though my informant is Norwegian, and not even from Norway, he has a lot of knowledge of other Scandinavian holidays and culturally important events because they’re all so related.

Palabok, New Year’s, and Circular Shapes

On New Year’s Eve, I always cook palabok… it’s a, it’s a rice noodle dish with shrimp stock and pork… but the most important part is the stuffs you put on the top.  You know how I always have you arrange everything in a circle, right? Have you ever noticed that even the toppings are circles?  So I put the noodles in a circular serving platter, and we have the slices of hard boiled egg, the chopped green onions, the boiled shrimp, squid rings, the calamansi halves.  All of that is supposed to be circular to invite wealth and abundance in the coming year.  Di ako sure kung talagang Pilipino yung tradition na ‘yun… (I’m not sure if that tradition really is Filipino) because the idea of circles is usually part of the Chinese culture.  Maybe it’s an influence, I don’t know, I didn’t really ever think much about when I started doing it or why.

Background: The informant is a 48-year old Filipina immigrant to the United States who is married to a Filipino-Chinese man.  She learned how to cook traditional Filipino foods from scratch from her mother and oldest brother in the Philippines, where cooking meals from household items was essential to maximizing the volume of food when money was scarce.

Context: This conversation happened at the dinner table, where the informant and I were eating store-bought palabok that was not arranged in circles.

I am not really very well-connected to the Chinese aspects of my identity, since I was raised only in the Philippines and the United States, where even my Chinese relatives had largely assimilated to the cultures of their respective environments.  Arranging food in a way that invites wealth from a different culture’s beliefs is a practice of my mother’s that I found more interesting after I began to reflect upon what she told me.  The circular food and arrangement is a call back to her previous life in the Philippines, where financial stability was a primary concern at every turn.  The sprinkling of a different culture’s traditions (likely my father’s influence) reminded me of myself, the way that they are mixed together.  Food is an incredibly important aspect of family life in the Philippines, and families in a household scarcely eat their meals separately.

Lentil Salad=Money

RITUAL DESCRIPTION: Consumption of lentil salad on New Years Eve to bring wealth.

INFORMANT DESCRIPTION: Female, 42, French

CONTEXT: This woman told me that her most prized ritual is that every New Years Eve she and her family would eat lentil salad in order to call wealth. She said the little lentils symbolize coins. Her mother and entire family did this as she grew up. The little “coins” are meant to be abundance and eating them is calling wealth into the upcoming year.

THOUGHTS: I see how lentils could be like little coins. I find this ritual interesting because lentil salad is popular in France but I never knew it had this double meaning. It seems to make sense although I’ve never heard of such an interesting food on New Years Eve.

QingMing Festival

Nationality: Taiwanese/Singaporean
Age: 21
Occupation: Student

Description: It is a Taiwanese holiday where people would visit the graves of their ancestors and loved ones. 

Background: It was considered a national holiday in Taiwan, where she lived.

Transcript:

BL: So there is a holiday in Taiwan called QingMingJie or QingMing Festival, some people call it Tomb-Sweeping day. It’s when we go to family burial grounds and we clean and decorate the graves and stuff.

Me: And it’s something you do every year.

BL: Yeah, it’s to honor and remember our ancestors and family. People also put stuff in front of the graves too, like food and flowers. Some people would also say prayers to the dead people. Oh we also burn paper, like burning paper money, we write things that we want our ancestors to have in the afterlife and burn the paper.

Me: I think my family does something similar.

BL: Yeah, but I think it’s more recognized in Taiwan because China used to not allow it. Like the cultural revolution and all that stuff.

My thoughts:

As said previously, the holiday was banned in China during the cultural revolution. I have heard about the holiday and participated in a few occasions. But I think this is a strong point of identity for Taiwan because of the banning of the festival, it is for this reason that it is a national holiday in Taiwan while it is a simple tradition in the mainland. Of course, the celebration and honoring of one’s ancestors is something that is consistently prevalent in Chinese and General East Asian culture. The main reason being the celebration of legacy and the immortality of the lineage. Someone is alive as long their ideas are passed on.