Share a traditiom

[Jitter]

Happy holidays to all Forumites!

Many of us have been more or less isolated for the past two years, and today we are entering the second year end holiday season in these exceptional circumstances. Maybe we are unable to travel where we’d like, or cannot meet loved ones we miss. Or maybe we have just the kind or celebration we like!

In any case, I was thinking maybe some of us want to celebrate together with out fellow Forumites as well! For me personally, the Forum has been an immensely important venue of social interaction and a way to keep in touch with people when real world meetings have been limited to non-existent.

In many of the Yuletide events, traditions from around the world have been shared, and it’s been a delight to learn about how others celebrate. So, would you guys like to share some of yours? Let’s describe a custom, food, song, or whatever you want to tell about your celebration. It can be something typical of your country, your group or your family, current or from your childhood, just something you want to tell. I’m not really looking for complete accounts of “my Christmas Day” but rather interesting tidbits.

I would also like to discuss each other’s traditions, but please make sure to not criticize. If something is not of interest to you, just skip it, ok? We don’t usually need such guidance, but just in case If someone eats or doesn’t eat meat, goes to Church or has a completely secular party, drinks a lot or not at all… comment, discuss, ask questions, but don’t criticize!

I am starting this on December 24, 2021, so I assume Solstice, Christmas, New Year and other year end celebrations are topical at first. But I’d love to hear about other traditions too, as the year(s) progresses! Let’s share, and learn, and rejoice together that we have this extraordinary community!

[Jitter]

I’ll start with one of ours. In Finland, which was a part of Sweden until 1809, it’s been customary to declare Christmas Peace. It’s based on medieval Swedish law. The city of Turku has carried out the declaration ceremony since 1320’s, and it’s the longest surviving instance of this once widespread tradition.

The declaration has been given in Turku every year with the exception of a period of Russian occupation in 1712-1721, which was a very difficult time in Finnish history, a strike in 19017 and in 1939 during the Winter War. It is also possible that some years were missed between 1800-1815. The original text hasn’t been preserved, but the overall message is known to be the same: observe peaceful behavior durum Christmas period, plus wishes of happy Christmas.

Nowadays it’s televised and I have watched it ever since I was a small child. I made my family watch it too earlier, but they aren’t interested enough to get up for it (at noon) so today I watched alone.

Usually there are loads of townspeople watching it live, but this year and the last it was done with no live audience. A weird sight.

Some background here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Peace

[tehta]

I can share some Polish Christmas Eve traditions. (I would imagine they will be familiar to any other Poles here, although the straw thing is probably regional. I wonder if any are popular in neighbouring countries?)

• Christmas Eve is, of course, a fast day, so there's no meat. Just many kinds of fish, and some vegetable dishes like barszcz (in my family, anyway). There should be twelve dishes, altogether.
• You shouldn't eat until the meal begins, and the meal should not begin until the first star is in the sky. (Not too bad in Poland in winter, but I used to live in the Middle East, where this definitely meant a late dinnertime.)
• The best tradition, in my opinion, is the sharing of the bread: before the feast begins, everyone picks up a piece of communion bread (it's freely available just before Christmas: newspapers often include it!) and then people mingle, meet up in pairs, and take pieces of each other's bread while making specific Christmas wishes tailored to each other. (In my family, "I wish your parents may have good children" is a favourite.)
• The feast table should include an extra place setting, either for a stranger in need or (more appropriately for Poland, given the huge Polish diaspora to which I belong) for a relative unexpectedly returning from abroad.
• The worst tradition is this one: there is straw under the tablecloth. At some point, everyone pulls out a piece, and the one who gets the shortest one is prophesied to die first.

[RanVor]

The straw thing is definitely regional, or at least the last part is, as I've never heard of it before. Putting a bundle of straw under the tablecloth is a thing.

The fast on Christmas Eve is not actually a religious dictate. It's just something people have taken to doing over the centuries.

[wavewright62]

Merry Christmas / Meri Kirihimete to those who celebrate.  *pictures a magician whisking the tablecloth out from under a laden table n Poland*

The solstice barely gets a passing mention here in the news, at least among the wider population. 
The celebration of Hanukah is confined solely to the Jewish community; it's not even known among the wider population in the way that Diwali has begun to be.

Since I don't celebrate Christmas, I don't have deep knowledge of how it's celebrated in New Zealand, but what I do know: for the pakeha population it's largely a pastiche of English traditions (or those of other countries of origin), somewhat adapted to long days and hot weather.  (also picturing the poor Polish families hanging on desperately for 10.30pm)   

Most offices in the country close completely for at least a few weeks over summer (I don't go back this year until 17 Jan), and school doesn't start for the year until February, so it's traditional to bugger off for the beach for the duration of the holidays.  They'll stay at campgrounds or at the beach house if they have one (extravagant to procure these days, but until recently these were ramshackle huts on any old bit of foreshore, cobbled together from whatever leftover building materials could be scavenged from other projects, and held by families for generations).  The campgrounds are packed, and the caravans often are decorated with at least some tinsel.

The dinner can be a turkey or ham, with an array of salads (any given family has their favourites), but is just as often a barbecue.  Strawberries and cherries are in season and always feature, often atop a pavlova.  Elaborately iced fruit cake and (fruit) mince pies are also popular - no sneering like I knew in the US!  Pasifika celebrations are much the same in terms of visiting and laying on superhuman amounts of food, but usually staying in homes, often the most commodious house available in the wider family.

Beach cricket / kilikiti gets played among larger families & groups, but largely it's sitting and eating and (copious) drinking.

Me?  December is nuts at work, screaming in to the very last day.  (And spending some time every evening working on our Advent Calendar here.)  I have procured some fine mystery jigsaw puzzles from a Kickstarter, which are still languishing in their wrappers.  Time to shove aside the work from home gear and devote table space to puzzle assembly! 

[Vulpes]

So interesting learning about other traditions!

In our family, letters were written to Santa on Christmas Eve (we had of course already made lists and discussed our demands with our parents), placed in an envelope, and then burned. The story was, the smoke went up the chimney and blew to the North Pole, where of course Santa could read it, because Magic. Dad was pretty good at sleight-of-hand and nearly always managed to slip the letters out so we only burned the envelopes; I found collections of the letters years later, when I was clearing out the house.

This tradition provided an early lesson in difference - I was stunned to learn at some point that not everyone did this. Quite the reverse - even in our extended family, ours was the only one with the letter-burning tradition. I was also bemused by people putting up their Christmas tree before Christmas Eve. We would listen to an LP of The Canadian Brass playing Christmas favourites, and decorate the tree. To this day, I associate The Canadian Brass with fir trees.

Perhaps the oddest tradition, though, was the placing of Mrs. Hines. This was a truly hideous ornament - a large double bauble with a sort of harp assembly, wrapped in what had once been shiny wire but had become a tarnished rat's nest. It reminded my parents of their first landlady, Mrs. Hines, who had an unruly mess of greying hair. It got a place of (dis)honour on the backside of the tree, nestled in deep where you had to really look for it. I'm not sure why they were so set upon honouring Mrs. Hines in this way, but until they stopped bothering with a tree when they got into their 70s, Mrs. Hines was always there.

[JoB]

*pictures a magician whisking the tablecloth out from under a laden table n Poland*

Well, that explains putting straw underneath it beforehand.

Spoiler: sorta depressing, I guess • show

With my work-vs-family situation, I'm sufficiently out of loop with our Christmas traditions that, when I came back from the work week yesterday evening, I entered my home town at the remote end - to do a drive-by and see whether I could find a place to grab something to eat. (Of course everyone was closed ... lucky buggers. ) The (comparatively recent) tradition of a Christmas Eve meal in Germany is potato salad and boiled sausages, so I grabbed a glass of wieners and a can of Gratin Dauphinois I still had from a trip to France and fired up the stove. (I did check beforehand that I can go buy fresh stuff in some larger supermarkets today, though.)