Holiday Survey As a special treat for the holidays we asked a simple question and received a wide range of answers in return. The holidays bring out different things for different people and our authors and illustrators are no exception. Their responses depict a time deeply rooted in tradition, thankfulness, and most of all, family. Happy holidays and have a peaceful new year. How do you celebrate the holidays and what do they mean to you? |
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Shadra Strickland When I am able to go to Atlanta to visit my family we usually celebrate with lots of great southern cooking, childhood stories, and bowling! My aunts, uncles, and cousins always go to the local bowling alley to try and roll a few turkeys (3 strikes in a row) to complement the one everyone just ate. The best part of the holidays is having everyone come together to laugh and enjoy each other. –Shadra Strickland is the illustrator of Bird |
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Katie Yamasaki The holidays have always been really important to my family and friends. My immediate and extended families are spread around the country and at times, the world. During the holidays we always manage to make it back home to Michigan, where I grew up. When we were younger, Christmas always involved a lot of gift giving and receiving. As the years have gone on though, we’ve all made a real effort to consume less, and let Christmas be what it should be—time with the family. Recently a lot of the gift giving has been donations made to different organizations we support, such as GEMS in New York City and Heifer International. Heifer International is an organization that provides animals and other services to families in all corners of the developing world in an effort to increase sustainable development, and end world hunger and poverty. The last few years I’ve “given” friends and family ducks, water buffalo, bunnies, sheep, llama, chicks, and geese. It is like a double gift—once to the recipient of the animal in some far off place and also to my own loved one. For the friend or family member who receives the card saying they’ve donated a water buffalo (or a share of a water buffalo because they are really expensive!), I’ll also make them some kind of painted or drawn object of the animal they’ve donated. A fun tradition my father (a former carpenter) started years ago, fearing his own children, nieces, and nephews would grow up unfamiliar with building, carpentry, and tools, was the “tool of the year” gift. These have ranged from the practical (sets of varied drill bits) to the mysterious. My favorite was a portable, battery-operated spotlight which I suppose you could put in your car (which I don’t have) and use to help you change a flat tire on a pitch black night—if it didn’t blind you first. It took twenty D-size batteries and had a 20,000 candle power energy equivalent, or something like that. It also used so much energy that the batteries had a lifespan of only twenty to thirty minutes. The only practical application for that “tool of the year” in my Brooklyn life, I guess, would be to make some weak attempt to stop crime on the streets. Nevertheless, it is a favorite holiday tradition. I guess over the years we realize more and more that in giving gifts, we don’t really need anything (even a 20,000 candle power spotlight) except more time set aside to be together, as we are all so busy and so spread apart geographically. In reducing our gift buying, it has made the holidays a lot better for everyone. We get to enjoy one another much more without all of the pressure to buy lots of stuff that none of us need. All we need is time. –Katie Yamasaki is the illustrator of Honda: The Boy Who Dreamed of Cars |
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Janet Halfmann To me, the holidays mean spending time with family. One of my favorite traditions is one we started more than thirty-five years ago when our oldest son was a toddler. He loved the sparkling Christmas tree and wished he could look at it during Christmas Eve dinner. So we decided to have a picnic on the living room floor. And we’ve been doing that ever since—through many additions to the family. I also love having the family get together to decorate the Christmas tree with ornaments accumulated through the years, many of them homemade. It’s fun to share the memories and stories behind the baubles. Christmas also wouldn’t be complete without Christmas sugar cookies, made with my mother’s recipe. Christmas Eve services are also special to me. I especially love the music and listening to my husband singing in the choir. –Janet Halfmann is the author of Seven Miles to Freedom: The Robert Smalls Story |
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Shino Arihara Holidays mean family, close friends, and lots of singing to me. We usually invite people over for a potluck dinner, and afterward my husband plays the piano while everyone gathers around him and sings all kinds of songs! Even though not everyone is a great singer, we always have so much fun. –Shino Arihara is the illustrator of A Song for Cambodia |
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Zetta Elliott I’m Canadian, and we celebrate Thanksgiving in October, so I’ve never really gotten used to having two holidays so close together. Sometimes I accept an invitation to a friend’s Thanksgiving dinner, but late November is a good time just to stay in and watch movies (after getting delicious Indian food from Curry in a Hurry!). Christmas is my favorite holiday—I love the music, the lights, and hoping for snow. . . . I hate to shop, but if I do venture out, I try only to buy handmade items at a fair trade store like Ten Thousand Villages. I don’t see my family often, and it has been hard for them to accept my wish not to exchange gifts, but recently my mother and sister agreed to buy a farm animal in my name for a family in a developing country. Christmas is a time for gratitude, and not shopping actually reminds me of how much I already have. I think the stories of Christmas have always resonated with me: a glittering star, the adoration of the Magi—just that phrase makes my imagination tingle! I have my own Christmas traditions: I always get a real tree and invite friends over to help me string popcorn and cranberries; at 11PM on Christmas Eve I watch the 1951 version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—one of the best movies ever made! I can recite nearly all the lines, (“Bear but a touch of my hand, and you shall be upheld in more than this”) and when it ends, it really is Christmas—Ebenezer has been redeemed and I’m filled with joy and hope. . . . Then I go to bed and wake to the sound of church bells pealing. I could surrender every other holiday—even my birthday—but I could never give up Christmas. –Zetta Elliott is the author of Bird |
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Nicole Tadgell The holidays mean spending time with family and friends. Although the preparation, travel and shopping are stressful, it’s always wonderful to hug loved ones and chat about everything! My husband and I host Thanksgiving at our house. We’ll have turkey, stuffing, sweet potato puff, mashed potatoes and gravy (canned, unfortunately, I’ve failed at making homemade!), and fresh bread. Since my father-in-law’s birthday is close to Thanksgiving, we celebrate that as well. I’m originally from New York, and that’s where my family is, so we try to travel there to spend Christmas with them, although it’s not always on Christmas Day. New Year’s we’ll spend with our friends, although it’s getting harder and harder to stay up ’til midnight! –Nicole Tadgell is the illustrator of No Mush Today |
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Robert McGuire The way we spend the holidays is usually determined by which country we are in at the time. This year we will be in Japan. Christmas in Japan is usually a time for couples and taken somewhat lightly in comparison to many Western nations. Many people in Japan eat Christmas cake, taken after culture in the United Kingdom, and KFC fried chicken, taken after American consumer culture. A commercial many years ago for the company showed an American family eating Kentucky fried chicken on Christmas and ever since it has been a custom in Japan. The lines in front of the stores sometimes wrap around the block! New Year’s Day here, however, in terms of families getting together, is very comparable to Christmas in the West. Our family here spends it making and eating mochi (Japanese rice cakes). This is done by pounding the cooked mochi rice with a giant wooden hammer until it is nice and soft, then adding different flavors to it like anko (sweet bean paste). Women often get dressed up in kimono for the traditional visit to the shrines and temples. You can get an omikuji there, which tells your fortune for the year. It you get a daikichi, you are very lucky. –Robert McGuire is the illustrator of The Last Black King of the Kentucky Derby |
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Ted and Betsy Lewin Since both our families are scattered across the country, we spend Thanksgiving with neighborhood friends whose parents live in Poland. We think we’ve become their surrogate parents. We always cook our own turkey anyway because we love the aroma that fills the house, and eating the turkey all week in different recipes. It’s a tradition in Betsy’s family to serve lemon sherbet with the turkey. On Christmas Eve we have a dinner of smoked salmon with capers and onions, Russian black bread, and champagne. Then we watch the movie version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Simm. On New Year’s Eve, we go to parties at several friends’ houses, then, close to midnight, we all go over to Pratt Institute where there is a huge gathering of people from all over the neighborhood for the annual Whistle Blow. The chief engineer at Pratt hooks up several antique steam whistles to an outside steam line, gets up a huge head of steam from the boiler which he blasts off at the stroke of midnight. Everyone gets a chance to pull the rope and blow a whistle. The steam rises a hundred feet in the air, enveloping the cheering crowds in dense, white steam. Everyone has brought their own champagne. Corks pop to the strains of Auld Lang Syne played on the steam calliope built by the chief engineer. –Ted and Betsy Lewin are the co-author/illustrators of Horse Song: The Naadam of Mongolia |
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Joseph Bruchac When I was a child, I always looked forward to and dreaded the holidays at one and the same time. Being brought up in the home of my maternal grandparents—the Bowmans—who lived only half a mile away from my parents who were raising my two younger sisters, meant that my holidays were a little like those in families where there’s been a divorce. Everything was doubled—two trees at Christmas, two different Thanksgiving dinners, two baskets from the Easter bunny. And, as in divorced families, there was a real atmosphere of competition between those two sides. And what made things even more complex was the ethnic diversity of my heritage. My father’s side was Slovak and Catholic and the big events always took place at the home of my other grandparents, the Bruchacs, where my three uncles and three aunts brought their children as well to sit around a huge dinner table where the food was distinctly eastern European. Those uncles and aunts never came to dinner at the home of my other grandparents, the Bowmans. There was a sort of DMZ between the two families and between my two grandmothers, each of whom “ruled the roost.” My mother’s side was a mix of English and American Indian (though that Native heritage was never talked about since the idea in those days was to fit in), and also Methodist—which was very different from Catholic, dramatically so back in the days of my childhood. Holidays were on a smaller scale with Grama and Grampa Bowman. At Christmas my grandfather and I would go into the woods to find a Christmas tree, choose it, thank it for its sacrifice, and bring it home to set up in the living room. At Easter my grandmother and I would boil eggs and color them—simple colors like reds and blues and greens. Eggs that would later show up in my lunch buckets. They were not like the intricately painted eggs (empty shells with their contents blown out) that my Slovak grandmother created, little works of art with ancient symbols that I learned only decades later harkened back to the Mother Goddess and fertility rituals. Our dinners were small affairs, just my grandparents and me, though there was always an extra place set for any traveler who might come by—as some did from time to time. The one place where I remember a similarity between our two families, one that never struck me much back then, was in church attendance. Both of my grandmothers were staunch members of their respective congregations. Not my two quiet grandfathers. The only time they went to church was Christmas and Easter. Though one was from Europe and the other’s roots were Abenaki Indian, they were much alike in that they felt most at home in the forest. “I pray with the trees,” Grampa Bruchac once told my sister Marge. And even though Grampa Bowman’s Abenaki ancestors (like most American Indian tribal people) have long known Christian ways, he too always felt the call of the forest. So now, with a family—and even grandchildren of my own—how do I feel about and celebrate the holidays? As far as Easter and Christmas go, in a non-secular American way. A Christmas tree set up a few days before Christmas, Easter baskets for the grandchildren. I’ve come to see those two celebrations—one which takes place at the darkest time of year and the other at the time of rebirth—as important times to bring families together, to rekindle hope out of darkness, to celebrate the return of the sun and the new life of the spring. Not just Christian celebrations (wonderful ones, when seen in the proper light of the spirit and not just in commercial terms), but times when we can find common ground, whatever our beliefs may be. But what about Thanksgiving? That’s a bit more complicated for me. In my childhood years there, too, were competing dinners at the two grandparents’ homes. And my mother and father and my sisters would actually come to the dinner at Grama Bowman’s. But as I grew older and learned more about the history of Thanksgiving, and about American Indian history in general, I came to see Thanksgiving in a different light. For many American Indians, it is not a time of giving thanks, but a time to remember all that was taken. The Wampanoag people who helped save the English Pilgrims from starvation, and their neighboring tribal nations, would be nearly wiped out and virtually all of their land taken from them within a generation by those same Englishmen. One of the first New England celebrations of Thanksgiving was after a massacre of American Indians, thanking God for guiding their bullets into the hearts of the heathens. More than any other American holiday, Thanksgiving has an extremely complex history and is often interpreted in ways that ignore the real history. And there’s another aspect to Thanksgiving, as well. The practice of giving thanks was never limited to a single day of the year among my Abenaki ancestors and the other tribal nations of the northeast. Thanksgiving was a daily thing and there was a great cycle of seasonal thanks giving times, such as the time of giving thanks to the Maple tree when its sweet sap is tapped in late winter. I’d like to see more thanks throughout the year. Still, despite its complexity, we do not ignore Thanksgiving as some American Indian families do. We come together to have a Thanksgiving dinner. Often turkey—maybe even a wild one that our older son James (the best hunter in our family) was able to bring in. And as we join our hands around the table, we say words in more than one language to express our gratitude for all the gifts of life and family this season has brought to us again. –Joseph Bruchac is the author of Buffalo Song, Jim Thorpe's Bright Path, Crazy Horse's Vision, and Bowman's Store  Holiday Survey 2010
Holiday Survey 2009
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