Resources
A Dinner Conversation About Culture
This conversation is intended to initiate discussion about the surroundings and culture in which you were raised. The idea is to learn about similarities and differences in which people grew up.
For adults, teens, and older children: Take a journey to your childhood and think about what, if any, holidays your family celebrated during December. Think about and discuss the following questions:
· What kind of celebration did you have?
· What was the name of the holiday?
· Were there any religious elements for you and your family?
· Remember and discuss the smells, the foods, the people, the decorations.
· Was there gift giving?
· Did the family gather together?
· Were there songs or prayers?
· Were there any special family traditions involved?
· Did your family attend a religious service at a church, synagogue, mosque or other place of worship?
· Do you have any other significant memories about this holiday?
· Did your friends, classmates, and neighbors celebrate the same or different holidays?
· Did department stores decorate, play music, and promote products for your holiday?
· Were schools and businesses closed for your holiday?
· What was it like to celebrate a holiday that most people in the U.S. celebrated? What was it like to celebrate a holiday that was not celebrated by most people in the U.S.?
· What do you know about the December holidays and celebrations of people who celebrated holidays that were different from your family?
For children: Invite your child to draw a picture or look at family photographs of the December holiday which your family celebrates. Ask him or her to talk about all of the things he/she can remember about the holiday from last year and ask what are all the things that are important and special about this holiday? Do you sing songs, draw pictures, decorate and talk about your holiday in school? Is your school closed for your holiday? Do any of your friends celebrate different holidays? How do they celebrate in their family?
Family Activities: Invite another family of a different faith or tradition from your family to share part of each other's holidays this year. You could invite each other to a family meal, celebration, or religious observance. If you don't know a family of a different tradition you can call local churches, synagogues and mosques to get more information or check the calendar section of local newspapers to find activities from different faiths that your family might attend to learn more about diversity during this time of year.
Information for adult, family and cross generational discussion: Often people who grew up in communities that were largely Christian assume that the December holiday is Christmas and think of their answers to the questions above as "normal" or "average" and talk about eating the "usual" Christmas foods or celebrating in the "typical" way.
But there are many other possibilities for holidays and celebrations around December. These include Chanukah, celebrated by Jews; Kwanzaa, celebrated by many African Americans; and the Winter Solstice, celebrated by many individuals who are part of organized religions and many who are not. For some faiths, agnostics or atheists, there may be no traditional December holiday.
During Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, candelabras known as Menorahs are lit for eight consecutive days, potato pancakes or latkes are eaten, and a game is played with a toplike "dreidl." Traditionally, simple gifts are exchanged during Chanukah. Chanukah celebrates the dedication of the new altar in the Temple at Jerusalem that occurred 165 years before the Christian Era. It later came to be linked with the miracle of one day's worth of oil burning for eight days.
During Kwanzaa, a kenora is lit and families celebrate seven principles including unity, self-determination, and cooperative economics. Kwanzaa is a 20th century American holiday developed by Maulana Karenga and first observed in 1966. It is based in part on traditional African harvest festivals but has a special emphasis on the role of the family and community in African American culture. It is not a religious holiday nor does it encourage gift giving.
If you grew up celebrating Christmas in a predominantly Christian community, most likely you understood your experience to be the norm. Perhaps you never heard of Chanukah or Kwanzaa until you were much older. Perhaps you still are not completely sure what those holidays are about and why Christmas is not celebrated by everyone. Perhaps you felt sorry for people who did not have Christmas trees. Or perhaps you thought that people who celebrated other non-Christian holidays were interesting, exotic, odd, or even un-American. Most likely, your early holiday experiences were part of what you believed to be average and normal and how you understand the "other", or people and groups that were different from you.
(Information for this article is excerpted from Linda Holtzman's book: Media Messages: What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach Us About Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation. Armonk, New York. M.E. Sharpe Publishers, September 2000.)