The holidays are an important time of year for many, with family traditions carried on throughout generations. Many common traditions include putting up and decorating the christmas tree, decorating your house with lights, baking cookies and spending time with family members. Some less common traditions might include hiding a pickle ornament around the Christmas tree or moving around an Elf on the Shelf for kids to find the next morning. Alongside these smaller traditions, many families have others related to their heritage that are important to their family.
Students at LZHS have many different holiday traditions they celebrate each year, coming from both sides of their family. Stevie Segretti, junior, shared her experiences having unique cultural traditions in her family.
“Depending on what side of the family [we’re celebrating with], we do different things. On my dad’s side of the family, we get together with my grandma’s side of the family and we make tamales. It’s usually a Christmas Eve tradition. We make two types of tamales. We make pork tamales, and we make [some with] cheese and peppers,” Segretti said.
Segretti’s family makes all their tamales from scratch and has been doing so for many years before Segretti was born. Family time is very important to Segretti and she cherishes the time spent with her loved ones because she often does not see them outside of the holidays. She also likes to learn about that side of her family’s culture.
“I really look forward to making tamales, because I don’t get to experience much culture from Mexico. I am not ethnically from any Spanish speaking country, [so] it’s interesting to see other different viewpoints of the world.” Segretti said.
On the other side of Segretti’s family they celebrate Christmas very differently. They open presents and eat her grandmother’s lasagna, but also celebrate another long standing cultural tradition from the other side of her family.
“One tradition we do is called Oplatki. It’s where you have a rectangular wafer that is often tasteless. It tastes just a communion wafer, and it usually has like an imprint of either the Virgin Mary or Jesus on it. And what you do is, everybody takes a piece of the wafer, and you go around taking other little pieces off of everybody else’s wafers to wish them good luck and saying a prayer for them,” Segretti said.
Oplatki is a Polish tradition that symbolizes family unity. It has been around since the 17th century and is deeply rooted in Polish culture around the holidays. Segretti’s family has been celebrating with Oplatki her whole life, and the tradition has been carried on for generations, as it is deeply important to her family of Polish descent.
“It’s something my mom and her family have been doing since my great grandma was alive. Over the years as things change, my dad’s family now comes with us on Christmas Day, and they’ve now become a big part of the tradition too,” Segretti said.
Long standing family traditions do not always come from inherited culture, such as finding the elf on the shelf. Elf on the shelf is a commercial tradition celebrated by millions of familys yearly with a daily scavenger hunt to find the elf in precarious situations. Segretti’s family who participates in the elf on the shelf tradition with their own unique Star Wars twist.
“We have a Darth Vader and C-3PO bobblehead. My brother has Darth Vader and I have a C-3PO and they’re hidden around the house, and we have to find them every morning, either before school or once we get home,” Segretti said.
While Segretti’s family is one of many whose holiday traditions usually stem from culture and generations of participation, students like Keira Carlin, freshman, start their own new traditions.
“At my dad’s house, there’s a local tree place and we go down there and we get the tree, and we’ll ask them to cut off a little part of the trunk. We write our own names, write our last name, and we’ll write the date. We have been doing it since 2017,” Carlin said. “We were trying to find something to do after my dad bought a house after my parents got divorced and we found this tree farm. When we got there they accidentally gave us the end in the barrell, so we were like, oh, we’ll take it. We kept that as a tradition ever since then, we hang them up at our mantel every year.”
At Carlin’s moms house, her family bake Swedish cookies yearly to celebrate their swedish culture and familys love of baking. Carlin especially looks forward to this tradition because it ties in her hobbies with spending time with her family.
“We love baking, so we bake a bunch of Christmas cookies and we have Swedish recipes that we make. We color them green and red and we’ll take a fork and indent them in the middle, so it’ll be a little pattern, and we’ll give them out to, like, all our relatives and all of our neighbors,” Carlin said, “My dad’s grandmother was Swedish, so she passed down like a recipe, and our family has been making it every year ever since.”
Her family makes hot cocoa from scratch along with other festive holiday activities, from playing in the snow to watching beloved childhood Christmas movies with her family to celebrate the season and feel the holiday spirit.
“We always build a snowman. We’ve had this snowman kit ever since we were, like, really young, and we built the same one every year. And sometimes we will build, like, little igloos out front in our house” Carlin said. “Another one in my family is watching Harry Potter, because it’s so Christmas themed that we’ll just watch a binge series of that during the Christmas time.”
Traditions are one of the most important parts of the holidays for so many families. They are all unique in their own way and are truly what make the holidays special. They can help you remember loved ones or make you nostalgic for Christmas’ past. Whether you spend your holidays with your whole family or a smaller circle or friends or immediate family alike, it is what you choose to do with them that matters.
“[Traditions] kind of just help you remember,” Segretti said. “[My] great grandparents were still alive, […] we used to do [this] with [them and] with [other] people that are no longer with us, and it’s kind of reuniting [with] them [through] something that meant a lot to the whole family.”
