Loss of Identity

Recently I was talking to my mom about our family holiday traditions. It's interesting to be at this stage in our lives and realize that we are not only combining our family traditions, but making our own as well. I't's less than a week until Christmas and it is just starting to feel like it. Luckily (almost) all of our Christmas shopping is done! I always have a hard time buying for my grandpa. He was born in 1919, lives with my parents, and only has a few things that he enjoys and is able to do now. Don't get me wrong, my grandpa is still completely with it. I often call home and just talk to my grandpa. He cracks me up! So, when I called him and asked what he wanted for Christmas and he said, "Anything I want or need can't really be bought with money," I knew I had to go back to my old boring stand-by gifts for him. We decided to go with Germade. Since we now live right by Lehi it is easy to get this for him and I know he enjoys it. My grandparents had either hot cereal or eggs for breakfast every morning except Sunday, because Sunday is the day of rest. Sunday mornings they had cold cereal, usually cornflakes, with a large helping of sugar from the sugar bowl on the table. I don't really know what makes Germade different from Cream of Wheat. I've always thought that it's consistency is a bit courser and it might be healthier.

Okay, back to my conversation with my mom about traditions. While we were talking I mentioned an episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain tries to find the perfect traditional Christmas fare from all over the world. I was mentioning how sad it was that the generation that was my grandpa's grandparents got to the US and was pressured to assimilate and become "American". Their kids didn't bother to learn their parent's language or traditions. What would my Swedish Finn great-great grandparents do for Christmas? My mom (who actually remembers her great grandpa, a ship builder that immigrated from Finnland, singing songs in swedish) told me that she had written a paper on this exact subject - the loss of identity and demasculinization of the fathers in that generation. How sad. The strong, proud fathers get to America in order to create a better life for their families and they have to accept work that they are overqualified for, lean on their children because they don't know the language, and ignore their heritage in order not to embarrass their family. I'm not saying it was all peaches and cream for the children of these immigrants, but it had to be hard for all involved.

Caga Tio

In ways I want to bring back some of the traditions from my genealogical heritage (thank goodness the traditions aren't as strange as some of the ones in Spain, like the Caganer or Caga Tio). In other ways I'm glad that Andrew and I get to make our own traditions. It's hard enough to decide what traditions from our adolescence we want to keep in our family and which ones we will change or let go of. Weirdly enough Andrew's family does heavy, heavy hang over for birthdays just like my family did. Now, if they also started hiding gifts and singing boola boola, I'd know that they were spying on my childhood!

Merry Almost Christmas !