Chapter 3 Reflection

I suppose it makes the most sense to me to refer back to my family to describe different traditions within my life because I’m actually looking forward to participating in another one in a few weeks--Thanksgiving. I was reading about how tradition is thought of in terms of the “lore” that is communicated between people, but also in terms of the way it is communicated between people (65). This made me think about my family because it is pretty much understood that when we are all together, we will start joking around and my brother will start to do his impressions of people. The jokes and comments were not simply spoken, they were almost acted in a funny voice. In order to comment back, we had to use another voice that would complement the first one. This used to be something that happened all the time, but now since he lives in California, it has changed to occurring basically on holidays because that’s when he can come home. I feel like this is an example of a tradition that has been longstanding, but now is changing somewhat, although it still continues when it can. I guess its kind of like we want it to continue, so we adapted it so that it could continue with our new situation (75).
Another tradition that I feel is becoming more important to me, but really important to my parents, is having everyone together on holidays. It used to be that we all lived at home and so we obviously were all around for all the holidays. That has changed over the past few years, and will continue to change because of college and life starting for the rest of the kids. My brother moved away to California, so now it’s a really special time when he comes home and we can all be together for holidays. I can tell that my parents want to salvage any special time like that because soon we will all have our own families, and things may change again.
In terms of my family, there are different traditions that I feel I saw the beginning of, but more just the beginning of them within my family--as opposed to the beginning of a tradition in general. For example, every time one of the kids has a birthday, my grandparents send us a card with some money in it. When my parents had my older brother, I don’t know if my grandparents knew if he’d be the only one or not. Once I was born, they assumed it’d be at least the two of us, and probably more, and they started sending us little bits of money on birthdays. This made me think about the tradition being both conservative and dynamic because the whole idea of giving a child a gift on their birthday is relatively old and doesn‘t depend on me, which makes it more conservative, but it is also dynamic because as we got older the amounts changed correlating with the needs or wants of a child that age (77). I suppose a lot of people probably get money from grandparents on their birthday, but I feel like its special for me because whether or not they are with me or not on my birthday, they tell me the same thing. They always say, “Happy Birthday, we just wanted you to have a little something special for you.” Maybe that in itself is more of a tradition to me than the actual gift. Anyway, I think its really cool that so many different things are imbedded within the folk group of my family. I never really thought about it, but there are a lot of things that keep us bonded together, that other people wouldn’t understand. This post is my response to the Chapter 3 Reflection question.