Tag Archives: new years

Collards & Cabbage

Nationality: American
Age: 70s
Residence: NC
Performance Date: 2000
Primary Language: English

My friend’s grandfather would come over to our house every New Year’s Day for a celebration dinner.  Every year, he would always bring collards and cabbage to dinner and everyone would eat more than their fair share.  I remember thinking this was strange because I wasn’t the only one who didn’t particularly care for them, yet everyone ate a large helping at dinner.  I finally asked my friend’s grandfather why he only brought collards and cabbage to dinner on New Years Day and he explained to me that if you eat collards and cabbage on New Years Day, it would bring you money throughout the year.

Of course, I was skeptical at first.  However, one year I decided to give it a try and eat some collards and cabbage at New Years dinner.  I didn’t come into a large sum of money, but I did have fairly good financial success throughout the year.  I’ve eaten them every New Years Day since then and I haven’t had any dire financial trouble yet.  I never asked my informant where she heard this piece of folklore from, but my entire family still makes collards and cabbage on New Years Day in hopes of good fortune in the upcoming year.

Vietnamese New Year Celebration

Nationality: Vietnamese American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/12/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

The informant is a 20 year old, Vietnamese American female. She is a junior at the University of Southern California, but was born in Boston, MA. Both her parents are Vietnamese and were born in Vietnam.

Over lunch, the informant told me about the Vietnamese New Year celebration that occurs at the time of the lunar New Year, the same as the Chinese New Year. The particular celebration that my informant is familiar with starts a week before the actual day of the New Year. This week is devoted to cleaning the entire house. Then, families make a tree with yellow leaves, a mai tree, and hang red envelopes from it, which contain money. When the New Year finally arrives, the envelopes are opened and the recipients get their money. Traditionally, married couples are the ones that give out the money, and little kids are the ones that receive it. Before a child gets his or her envelope however, he or she must say, “Happy New Year, may the New Year bless you” as a type of chant almost. The envelopes are red because it is the color of luck and is meant to promise a lucky year for the recipient.

While this is all my informant had to say about the celebration, I had a few more possible interpretations for elements of it. First of all, I’d never heard that cleaning the house was part of a New Year’s celebration. The informant mentioned that the Vietnamese traditions borrow a lot from Chinese traditions, so maybe the idea of cleaning a week before the celebration has to do with the fact that seven is a very important number in the Chinese belief system. After thinking about it some more, the only conclusion I could come to was that starting off the New Year with a clean house was to indicate a fresh start in life for the following year. Also, the importance of the mai tree in the celebration may similarly reference the idea of newness, or maybe even Spring, which will arrive shortly after the start of the New Year.

鏡餅 (Kagami Mochi) — Japanese Foodways

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Nagoya, Japan
Performance Date: 4/2/12
Primary Language: Japanese
Language: English

鏡餅, literally translated from the Japanese, means “mirror rice cake.” This name, though thought to have originated from the mochi’s resemblance to a old-fashioned kind of round copper mirror, has no relevance at all to its folkloric aspects. 鏡餅 is a traditional Japanese New Years decoration, consisting of two round mochi (rice cakes), the smaller placed atop the larger, and a Japanese orange with a leaf placed on top.

鏡餅 -- Traditional Japanese New Years decoration

My informant is a student in Nagoya, Japan, and has had 鏡餅 decorations every year for New Years, for as long as she can remember. Recently, however, she said that her family has settled on buying the cheaper, mass-produced 鏡餅, which are often pre-moulded into the shapes of stacked discs and sold in plastic packages at the supermarket. A plastic imitation bitter orange is substituted for the original. In some cases, there are actual rice makes within the plastic casing; however, even if there is, she said she has not heard of many families who actually enjoy eating the mochi. “Because it’s been there for so long,” She said. “It gets all stale and gross and no one wants to touch it.” The plastic casing, however, is preferred by most contemporary people because it keeps the mochi inside free of rot and germs. They break open and eat the mochi usually on January 11th, in a ritual known as 鏡開き (which literally means, “breaking the mirror”), in order to celebrate the breaking of the old year, for the arrival of the new. By this point, the mochi has become so stale that it usually has cracks on the surface; however, because cutting it with a knife has negative connotations (cutting off ties), they usually crack it open with their hands or some other heavy object.

The two mochi discs are said to symbolize the coming and going years, as well as the balance of yin and yang, although most people, including my informant, do not know exactly how those two concepts apply to the structure of the 鏡餅, or why it has to be mochi at all–it is simply something a ritual they have performed in the past, and so they repeat it, to end their year on the “right note,” and to enjoy a sense of camaraderie with the rest of Japanese society.

That most contemporary 鏡餅 is mass-produced in plastic casings is significant because it indicates the widespread performance of a folk ritual that seems to have no inherent personal meaning in the lives of most households. If there was inherent meaning, they would perhaps be more keen on performing it the traditional way–making the rice cakes themselves or even just buying them and stacking them together, placing the bitter orange on top. As it is, however, it has become for my informant “something my mom just picks up from the supermarket when she realizes it’s almost New Year’s.”

Bayberry Candle

Nationality: American
Age: 51
Residence: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Performance Date: April 2007
Primary Language: English

My Mother said that growing up, her mother would always burn a bayberry candle on Christmas Eve for good luck and that they would also burn it on New Years Day for good luck. It would burn the entire day until it the wax ran out.

According to my mother, this tradition comes from England, and then was continued as a New England tradition during colonial times. My mother told me that her mother’s side was English, and had the last name of Trasp, which is where the tradition of burning the candle came from in her family. She was not sure why it was a bayberry candle was burned, however.

My mother said that it wasn’t a tradition to make the candle, they usually just bought it. But the candle comes from the wax scraped off the berries of the bayberry shrub, and the bayberry plant is found in both Europe and North America.

This is interesting because in earlier colonial times the bayberry wax would be collected, perhaps because the animal fat used to make candles was scarce. Now the candles are made from other materials, with the bayberry scent, and burned for the sake of tradition.

The interesting thing that I found was that there were many traditional things that my mother did for good luck that came from different regions, and the bayberry candle was just one of them. There were multiple traditions around the holidays and my mother said they did them all, from burning a bayberry candle to a traditional German New Year’s dinner.

German New Year’s Dinner

Nationality: German/Irish-American
Age: 52
Residence: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Performance Date: April 2007
Primary Language: English

My informant, whose background actually features multiple nationalities, remembers her traditional dinner that they had every New Years day for good luck. It consisted of pork and sauerkraut. When she talked of this dinner she actually referred to it as a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, the Pennsylvania Dutch actually referring to German Immigrants, a mispronunciation of the German word for Germans, Deutsch.

The sauerkraut is cooked in a crock-pot with the pork for the entire day, and my informant said that apples were sometimes included in the pot with the sauerkraut to make it sweeter. Considering the abundance of apples in the region, this is no surprise that they were used.

The Pennsylvania Dutch traditional dish from which my informant’s contemporary meal comes from is actually something known as hog maw, which was pork sausage and potatoes stuffed into in a cleaned pig’s stomach, boiled, and sliced.

My informant also mentioned that kielbasa, an Eastern European traditional sausage, was also included with the shredded pork and sauerkraut.  This influence comes from the Pittsburgh area, which features a large eastern European population that immigrated to the area for jobs in the steel mills around the turn of the century 1900s.