A curious meerkat is curious....

[lagilman]

Was not quite so successful on Thursday in killing the to-do list.. one item keeps returning, despite efforts to nail it down and part of the day was taken up with back-and-forth e-mails with a client. But I did get 1500 new words down, and a difficult scene is through, so that was good. Friday, so far, has been given over to crisis. Multiple, yes. Mainly of the "can't you people see I'm trying to work here!" sort, rather than the "call the cops and ambulances" sort, so it's not worth more than a grumble.

Discussion on Facebook (yes, it is possible to have a discussion on Facebook, although it takes some doing) has led to a conversation about cultural habits and how -- at least in the New World -- it's tough to pinpoint where something came from. Do I say that X tradition came down from my Latvian relatives? My Russian ancestors? The side of the family that came from a part of Europe that's changed hands a dozen times in the past 200 years? How about the branch of the family that falls under "Midde Eastern/Asian/Somethingorother?"

[this is why I laugh, hard, whenever a survey asks if I'm Caucasian. Because, yeah dude, my family has some roots in the Caucasus region. Please don't slap me in with the WASP who came over on the Mayflower, who are NOT Caucasian... but I digress]

Anyway, that discussion led me to bring the expanded question over here. Do y'all have family traditions that you can clearly identify as being from such-and-such culture? Or are they more mangled and recreated? And, as a corollary to that, do you see yourself as being the scion of one particular culture, or is your family tree actually more a thicket of transplanted shrubbery?

[non-New Worlders can play too -- am curious to see if this is a geopolitical thing, an American Thing, or not a Thing at all...]

Comments

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

We have pork and sauerkraut every New Year's (German heritage) and black-eyed peas every New Year's, too, which is a Southern thing.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Heinz 57 here, including native .. we just say its a family trad and be done with it. Except when we send up the Prussian need for order and world domination.

[wedschilde.livejournal.com]

ah, from hawai'i... and very much a blended poi dog. i can clearly see where i am ethnically mingled and where i'm culturally mingled. i think i skew more japanese, irish with hints of hawaiian and just a touch of portuguese in culture and behaviours whereas i'm more ethnically portuguese than irish.

[lagilman]

But do you see yourself as a Southern American (as opposed to a Damned Yankee) or A German-American, or something completely different? And are you 100% pre-immigration German? because I suspect that makes a difference from someone who has, say, German and African grandparents...

[the meerkat on the scent of an answer is a fearsome and annoying thing...)

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

I see myself as American with a strong Eastern European flavor. It was in the tap on the cheek I received when I hit menses (which, in the Old Country, was a full-fledged slap). It's in the way I prepare brisket (New World root veggies flavored with Old World spices). It's in the Yiddish that salts my vocabulary. It's in the no-rice-at-Passover tradition (that's Ashkenazic but it's not Sephardic). I'm sure there's more, but that's what strikes me off the top of my head.

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

I tend to view myself as a New Englander, though the bloodlines include Irish, English, German and a little bit of Scottish...

Y'know, I'm not sure I have any family traditions that I recognize as traditions rather than just "how I do things."

[lagilman]

*snort* My family is Ashkenazic and Sephardic. I'm not sure non-Jews can understand the chaos and amusement that brings with it...

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

Well, my mom's mom's family came from Germany several generations back and lived in West Virginia, where some of my vocabulary comes from. (I still say "red off the table" to mean clean it off, and I still have the phrasing of "need" followed by an -ing verb, which drives other editors nuts.) My mom's dad was an orphan, and I don't know what his background was. My dad's family--who knows? They were partly Black Dutch, everyone said, though no one agreed what that was--and from Texas as far back as anyone remembered, which wasn't that far.

I've always considered myself a little bit of a lot of things. :)

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

The first time I attended a Sephardic Passover seder, I was surprised to see rice and fish on the table. I was more surprised, and completely delighted to hear Greek and Ladino. We did the seder in four language--the other two were, of course, Hebrew and English. The Greek had never heard Hebrew, so I was delighted to oblige.

[julibeth.livejournal.com]

I'm half Italian, and half a french-irish-british cross.

I associate more with the Italian side, because we're closer connected on that side. My great grandparents (all four of them on that side) came over from Italy.

[sierrawyndsong.livejournal.com]

Both sides of my family is Cajun with French/Spanish influence prior their brief stop off in Canada
Mainly our tradition was learning to make roux and subsequently Gumbo
But the two families had different ways of making Gumbo and the darkness to which they prefer....

I am a second generation English speaker who was born and raised near Lafayette, LA (It's right between New Orleans and Houston on I-10)
So I guess I consider myself a Southerner who spoke French and English for most of her life?

*** I don't know if any of that counts toward the discussion....

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Thicket.

Irish and Mennonite German (via Canada, with earlier stops in the US), Bohemian (the real kind, not the lifestyle), early New England British, some ill-defined admixture of Native American. Wife has Lithuanian, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Romanian roots, all of them varying rigors of Jewish.

Ethnic purity? It is to jest.

[girasole.livejournal.com]

We celebrate and rejoice and bring solace with food. That comes directly from the Italian-American part. We celebrate as much as possible: Solstice, new year's, Valentine's, Easter/Spring, birthdays. That's Italian, too, although it is certainly rooted in this family's New York tradition.

It's more than that, I think. I deeply associate myself with my Italian-American habits, and less so but still strongly with the Italian ones (there are great differences, of course.0

But some traditions we just invented. We sing Happy Birthday to the tune of the Halleluia Chorus. My nieces and nephews, now mostly grown, shout out "it's a book!" at the sight of every gift from me, because it always is.

A most interesting question, O Meer.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

By ancestry, 7/8th Danish and 1/8th Faroese (Faroe Islands, a territory of the Danish kingdom). I grew up in a very ethnic household but then, one of my parents is an immigrant.

Religiously, though, I am Jewish, married to a Jewish-American, so my kids were raised less ethnically (although more religiously than I was), if that makes sense.

[lagilman]

It's ALL fodder. But in this case, I'm just being curious about how people see themselves -- and who's willing to talk about it.

[lagilman]

there is a rather famous story of Spanish families -- good Catholics all -- who every Friday night gathered for a family dinner that started with the woman of the household lighting candles. None of them knew why, it was just "what we did." Turns out almost every family were Jews whose great-whatevers had been forcibly converted during the Inquisition, and internalized the specifically Jewish traditions until they no longer remembered where they'd come from...but they never stopped doing them.

Every 'tradition' or habit comes from somewhere, even if we don't remember or can't trace it back directly.

[lagilman]

Was there anything that came down, tradition-wise, from that, though? Or anything you think _might_ have, but aren't sure any more?

[lagilman]

mmm, except my question wasn't "where do you come from" but "what have you made from it?"

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

My family is almost entirely English with just enough Irish and German that we had recognizably Irish and German last names in recent relatives. We mostly think of ourselves as "Standard American Mutts."

As for traditions... my family has been in the US so long that any distinctive old-world traits have all worn away.

[lagilman]

"Standard American Mutts."

I'm not sure English/German/Irish actually qualifies as a mutt, sorry. ;-) bringing in some West Indies, or French, or Asian....

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

If my family looks earlier than the civil war we add a few other nationalities, but they are all northern/western Europeans. I'd say we're as much mutts as a dog descended from 6 different herding breeds would be. The breeds may have been pretty darn similar to start with but they are technically separate. :-)

I have a theory about family traditions. The ones that seem to last longest are related to food, especially holiday food, and since women make so many of the food decisions and do so much of the food related work, it's the traditions of the female line that are most likely to continue over the generations.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

My family is Welsh and Scots, with some English, and some Flemish. Britain now is so mixed in terms of the indigenous (more or less) cultures that it's hard to pinpoint what comes from where without being facetious (the Welsh talk about who has died all the time).

Apart from that I have numerous Indian relations and my partner's nieces are connected to the Ugandan royal family (like everyone else in Uganda, as far as I can tell). Changes all the time...

[6-penny.livejournal.com]

My maternal grandmother's family were Long Island Dutch, her father's family were from Denmark, which is where her Christmas receipes came from

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

My mother was an orphan at age 8, and was raised by her (not altogether loving, I'm told) elder sisters.

My father was put out into the street as a child during the Depression. My grandfather lost the candy store he owned, his house, everything.

Me, I grew up with absolutely no connection (except the expectation that I go to church on Sundays) to my Irish heritage. We ate mac and cheese, meat loaf, hamburgers, spagetti, etc.--All-American Food.

Did the first two things lead to the third? I kinda think so.

[house-draven.livejournal.com]

Most of my family traditions I can clearly label as being either Jamaican, English, Scottish, or French. Some are sorta hodgepodge, though.

[theantijoss.livejournal.com]

I'm a fairly typical Pan-European mutt: Irish, Scottish, English, German. On my father's side, many of those became Canadians before they became Americans (I think my paternal grandfather might have been the first generation born in the states). My mother's were more close-to-Mayflower arrivals, and have lived in New England and Virgina for generations. Culturally, I consider myself American, but I identify the most closely with my Scottish heritage, and I've done a lot of study in Celtic history and lore. As a kid I felt sort of adrift culturally, so I did a lot of exploring.

My family is a fairly typical modern American WASPY polyglut when it comes to celebration. My parents are nominally Christian, so we have family gatherings on Easter and Christmas, plus birthdays, Thanksgiving, New Year's, and Valentine's Day. There isn't a whole lot of ritual or real spiritual dimension with any of it, however.

As an adult, I identify as more or less Celtic Neo-Pagan, so I observe the wheel of the year, as well, though I confess to not being as observant as I once was.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Um, not sure if there really are any family traditions, so thoroughly homogenized and Americanized my family is. If anything, probably Western Oregon Farmers is as close as we come to any tradition. The closest I can come to any European background is the Revolutionary War--and it's a couple of generations back.

My family tended to be fiddle-foots that wandered all over the American continent and even though they settled in Western Oregon in 1852/3, they tended to wander up and down the west side of the state. I don't think any of my ancestors died anywhere near where they were born. Maybe my paternal grandmother, but that would be it.

So yeah, wandering might be my family tradition...and, as far as I know, I'm English (Cornwall) and possibly German, with a very faint hint that there might be some Native American in there somewhere.

As far as cultural traditions go, the weird thing is that the pioneer and Native American traditions and legends tied to the countryside where I was born, raised and now live resonate more than any of the European background that's quite a few years back.

[tremblor.livejournal.com]

My family has a strong identification with my mother's roots, which are Bavarian. I guess a simple tradition is our Christmas Eve dinner, which is primarily white sausages, shaaaaaarp mustard, and sauerkraut.

But, we lived in Germany intermittently over the years, and most of us have traveled back on occasion. We all view ourselves as American, but feel a deep connection with our heritage.

[javacatz.livejournal.com]

My family is Ashkenazic and Sephardic too. Three quarters of the great grandparents came from Besarabia, and the remaining grandparents came from somewhere just over the border in Russia. All migrated to the US right around 1900, give or take a few years, settled up north and mostly stayed in that region. In 1969, my parents moved to Louisiana, where I grew up.

Growing up as part of the religious minority (less than 1/2 of 1 percent of Shreveport's population is Jewish), I usually told people I was raised in a family of Yankees stuck in the South. I'm not sure how many differences in my family are from yankee/southerner differences, grandparents being born and raised in different country or even the religious differences in the local community. Probably a combination. I do know that I tend to be far more abrupt or outspoken than most people I knew growing up, except for my immediate family. Think typical Jewish household, loud, gregarious and lots of food involved clashing with soft-spoken genteel Southerners. We stuck out like a sore thumb. :-)

[lyonessnyc.livejournal.com]

Mine's a thicket that ranges from Jamestown settlers and a Mayflower family, to eastern European Jews fleeing a pogrom at the beginning of the 20th century. With a bit of Cherokee and German in between (the German starts before the Revolution, and is most recently at the beginning of the 20th century too).

I have British (Scots, Irish, Welsh, then English) traditions, I have Jewish traditions, I have German traditions, I have just plain who effing knows traditions. [shrug]

[fakefrenchie.livejournal.com]

I consider myself a New Englander. My grandfather on my mother's side was born in Norway and he and his siblings were beaten by the parents if they spoke Norwegian, because they were Americans now. My mother's mother was of English stock. According to my uncle's genealogy (<=sp?) work, my father's father is reputed to be a by-blow of Princess Di's randy grandfather, my father's mother was French via Germany via Nova Scotia (Noël=>Weinacht=>Wynot). So I guess ending up in France was fated! ;-)

Traditions are all food related.