Holyday Traditions
Jan. 1st, 2009 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ickaimpWas talking to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darthanne about regional traditions and realised I forgot to post about one of my favourite Southwestern ones:
... Johannes and I both grew up calling these 'Luminario', but it seems like most people know them as 'Luminaria'. Either or?
The traditional way to do these is to get a brown paper bag, fold the top edges down, fill the bottom with sand or gravel and put in a votive or tea candle. I've also seen small bricks with holes carved in them for the candle. They're usually seen on Christmas Eve, but with the electric kind coming out in recent years (such as these), they're seen more commonly throughout December.
Albuquerque especially does massive displays.
The electric ones are cool too, cause then the candle doesn't blow out. ^__^
The original conversation came about because we were talking about the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas on New Years.
Any other New Years traditions people do?
darthanne about regional traditions and realised I forgot to post about one of my favourite Southwestern ones:... Johannes and I both grew up calling these 'Luminario', but it seems like most people know them as 'Luminaria'. Either or?
The traditional way to do these is to get a brown paper bag, fold the top edges down, fill the bottom with sand or gravel and put in a votive or tea candle. I've also seen small bricks with holes carved in them for the candle. They're usually seen on Christmas Eve, but with the electric kind coming out in recent years (such as these), they're seen more commonly throughout December.
Albuquerque especially does massive displays.
The electric ones are cool too, cause then the candle doesn't blow out. ^__^
The original conversation came about because we were talking about the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas on New Years.
Any other New Years traditions people do?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 11:02 pm (UTC)Among the Chinese (although Chinese New Year isn't until the 26th), one of their thousand-and-three New Year's customs is to eat some sort of leafy green vegetable, such as bok choy or yu choy, or even Western iceberg lettuce, called "saang choy" in Chinese. As with so much of Chinese (and Japanese) superstition, an auspicious pun is involved: "choy", the word for green leafy vegetables, is homonymous for the word for "wealth."
Compare this with the American tradition, mentioned by previous posters, of eating collard or turnip greens (that's the Southern/African-American version; a lot of folks of Northern and Eastern European descent prefer cabbage, fresh and/or as sauerkraut) because the green vegetables are thought to resemble U.S. paper bills--the same practice, for the same reason, arrived at from a completely different direction! That fascinates the hell out of me.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-05 03:13 am (UTC)-We're planning on celebrating the Chinese New Year as a group on the 25th, so I'm gonna be doing a lot of reading on it soon. Yay for the heads up!
And you're right, that is really fascinating. ^__^ I love how some culture things seem to crossover without realising it.