Tag Archives: pop culture

Thanksgiving Tradition

Age 20

Informant “Growing up, we always watched [Pactical Magic] when I was a kid. Then, during COVID, we started watching it a lot again. My family all lives in the same town, so Thanksgiving used to be a huge gathering—like 35 or 40 people—because we’re basically all neighbors. We’d always go to my aunt’s house.

But because of COVID, we couldn’t do that anymore. Everyone had Thanksgiving at their own houses, and we started having a smaller one at my grandma’s. There were still a lot of people, but it dropped to around nine, which was a big change.

Around that time, we started doing something inspired by a scene in Practical Magic called “Midnight Margaritas.” In the movie, they make margaritas, turn on the song “Coconut” (the “lime in the coconut” song), and dance around the table. We do a kid-friendly version—no margaritas—but after we say grace, we turn on “Coconut” and dance around the table until the song ends. We have to finish the song before we can eat.

It’s honestly such a random tradition. My aunt and I were like, “This would be so fun if we started doing this,” and it just stuck. At the time, we didn’t know how long things would be different because of the pandemic, but now it’s something we do every year.

We only do it if Thanksgiving is at my grandparents’ house—it’s just not the same anywhere else. Plus, no one else really knows the movie like we do. But it’s really fun, and it’s kind of special to look back on videos of it. You can see how much everyone has changed—some of the kids weren’t even walking back then, and now they are. It’s cool to see that transformation over time.

Context: Following the COVID-19 pandemic the informant’s family started a new Thanksgiving tradition based on a movie they watched a lot as a family. It only occurs when they are at her grandmother’s house.

Analysis:

While this tradition is ultra-specific to the informant’s family, I think it is an interesting example of “family lore” possibly being created. Twenty years down the line, when this tradition is still possibly occurring the lines of how and why this tradition may be blurred and have a story passed down with it.

More generally this is a family-based ritual tradition embedded within the larger cultural framework of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving itself is a widely recognized American holiday centered on food, gathering, and expressions of gratitude, but what the informant described shows how individual families develop micro-traditions that distinguish their celebration from others.

It is also evidence of how pop culture and access to the internet can affect long-held traditions of groups and shape the way they are done moving forward.

“…got the keys”

Nationality: USA

Age: 19

Occupation: Student at USC

Residence: Thousand Oaks

Performance Date: 2/20/2023

Primary Language: English

Background: This is a saying that was popular in a Californian middle school in the early 2010s referencing American Pop Culture.

Informant: I remember this being a popular phrase said around my Californian middle school. It’s almost a way of saying that someone has the skills, abilities, and the intellect that others lack. May be a reference to a DJ Khaled song, but I’m not entirely sure. Overall, it’s a really jokey thing to say. For example, if the whole class was having difficulty on a math problem, but one student knew the answer, another student may remark, “he’s got the keys.”

Analysis: I believe that this saying is limited to the informant’s middle school because I have asked around other Californian students and no one has heard of the saying. The song mentioned by the informant is “I Got the Keys” by DJ Khalid featuring Jay-Z and Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFLSOIufuhM.

Dungeons and Dragons Ritual: “How Do You Want to do This?”

Nationality: American

Age: 17

Occupation: Student

Residence: Staunton, VA

Performance Date: April 21st, 2021

Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

“Oh! Yeah, so ‘How do you want to do this?’ is a thing that’s been picked up since it’s been become used by Matt Mercer in Critical Role where like if a person gets a sufficiently good kill at like, say, the end of a combat, the DM will go ‘How do you want to do this?’ And then the player will describe how they eviscerate their enemies.”

Background:

A little pop culture background is necessary to understanding this folklore. After the release of the 5^th edition of the table-top role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, D&D live-play shows became a popular form of entertainment. The most famous and successful of these shows is Critical Role. This is a practice that the Dungeon Master of Critical Role, Matt Mercer, employs that others have picked up. It’s been proliferated to the point that despite not being part of any official D&D material, Dungeon Masters may say “How do you want to do this?” at the end of an encounter because they know that’s the common thing to do even if they’ve never seen the show or don’t know from where the phrase originates. My informant saw this practice as a way to get players involved with the “theatre of the mind” portion of D&D and increase “coolness.”

Thoughts:

What’s interesting about this example is that it’s very recent and fast-moving folklore. There’s even an argument to be made that it could count as having authorship to some degree, as its origins can be traced back to a singular figure, but there’s no ownership.

Besides the interpretation that my informant offered- that it helps increase player engagement -there’s another possible function of this phrase. It signals that combat has come to an end. Dungeons and Dragons has a signal for the beginning of combat baked into the rule set. Everyone rolls “initiative” to see in what order they take their turns. There is no instituted method to exit combat. This phrase helps bridge that awkward gap. Within the game, there is a liminal space that isn’t naturally bridged. The way this new unofficial ritual is constructed, there’s a set way that the players and the DM end combat. When that ritual is complete, the liminality has been bridged and the mode of play changes.

Raindrop, Drop Top Joke

Toy Story Pencil — Japanese Entrance Exam Folklore

Nationality: Japanese

Age: 18

Occupation: Student

Residence: Nagoya, Japan

Performance Date: 3/23/12

Primary Language: Japanese

Language: English

In Japan, unlike America, college admission is determined by one’s passing or failing of one entrance exam on one specific day. There are no chance for re-takes, and there is no alternate test. The rules are strict; if you happen to be sick on that one day, if you get into a car crash on the way there, you could either take the exam while sick or injured, or wait and study for another whole year to take the exam the year after. Furthermore, the rules dictate that you may only take one entrance exam per day. If two prospective schools are having their entrance exams on the same day, you are required to choose the one you prefer more. Students in Japan begin to study for their college entrance exams usually as early as their last year of middle school, studying for a total of four or more years (at school, at home, and in cram schools whose classes often go well past midnight) in preparation for one exam on one day. The rules are strict, admission to the four or five most prestigious programs that everyone tests for is notoriously difficult, and all the hard work may come down to being sick on the one day that determines the course of your life. The system, in a word, is merciless.

My informant lives in Nagoya, Japan, and had up until a month ago, been snared in this system. Having completed her college entrance exam and confirmed her entrance to Sophia University, she looked back on the past few years of her life and told me that it must have been the most stressful time of her life, but that she had her “Toy Story pencil” to help her out. Laughing, half-joking, she said that it actually must have been the pencil that had allowed her to pass the exam.

The “Toy Story pencil” had risen out of a legend circulated at her high school. A few years back, a male student from their high school had passed the entrance exam to Tokyo University, arguably the most prestigious school in Japan. This by itself would not have been legend-worthy, except that nobody had expected very much of him; he had begun to study for the entrance exam his final year of high school when everybody else had already been studying for years, and was ranked a little bit below average in his class. People knew of him, however, because of his obsession with Disney and especially with Toy Story. He watched all the movies, went full-out Woody on Halloween, had a Toy Story pencil case, and was apparently very skilled at drawing pictures of all the characters.

When word got around that he had been accepted to Tokyo University, the rumors and the legends began. He apparently had a pen that he had been using for years, a Toy Story pen that he had bought at some local stationery store. It was well known amongst his immediate classmates that he took pride in the fact that he had not lost that pen for his entire final year of high school, the year that he had finally begun to study for the exam. “He took that pencil everywhere,” My informant said. “I mean, it’s really hard not to lose pencils. I must go through at least like, ten or so a year. So it was pretty impressive, actually.” Thus, the younger students at the high school immediately latched onto the pen as a source of good luck magic in exam-taking, making it a sort of folk object–if you could use that pencil and only that pencil for your final year of high school, and you didn’t lose it and it didn’t break, you would be able to pass any entrance exam you took. My informant and her friends, who had not known the Toy Story boy but had long heard of the legend, had dutifully bought their one and only Toy Story pencil at the beginning of their final year. My informant used the Toy Story pen every day, careful not to break it, keeping track of it all times, and eventually passed the exam to her dream school, Sophia University. There were others though, of course, that used the pencil and failed their exams, but then again, said my informant, the pencil was more of a motivational tool than anything else–just having it made one feel more in control. Over her spring break when she visited me, she gave me a Toy Story pencil and told me that if I took care of it, I would probably see good results for the rest of the semester, and I am still using it now.

This intense fixation on an object for good luck, I believe, arises naturally from Japan’s merciless education system. In this system, the students themselves have little to no control. There is one exam per year; there is a pass or fail. “There are,” said my informant, “so many things that could go wrong. I could’ve gotten sick, and they would’ve just said, too bad, come back next year. I tried so hard for the week before the exam not to go out of the house and to eat healthy and sleep a lot, but still. Everyone gets so paranoid before the exams, and there’ve been stories of people sabotaging each other. There’s so much anxiety.” Anxiety, I thought, was the key word. The Toy Story pencil was a small but effective way to soothe anxiety that could give way to more anxiety. It gave people confidence, which perhaps made them study harder.

The Toy Story pencil reflects the intense collective fear and anxiety in the minds of Japanese students concerning the entrance exam procedure. Grabbing at straws, the students at my informant’s high school had clung to this legend, this folk object, to give themselves some semblance of control–and perhaps, strangely enough, it works.

USC Digital Folklore Archives

A database of folklore performances