Unit 9
Holidays:A Step to Acculturation
Holidays are very important for us :they “glue” us to people around us by being a common experience, a socially meaningful historical event or a cultural or religions celebration. It is our common territory, the ground we all stand on.When dinner or for gifts, we feel secure and connected.
But what happens if we leave our history and cultural traditions behind before we acquire a set of new ones and we find ourselves in a cultural and social vacuum? When we immigrate to a new country, our body is physically transported, but how about our soul? It seems to be wandering in-between the worlds, looking for something to hook to. This hook, in my experience, can be a holiday——a cultural event that would make the click happen.A holiday can create the intellectual context for learning, and it is through this learning that the emotional integration might occur.
Striving for cultural and emotional meaning, for the sense of feeling connected in order to survive emotionally, to fill in the void brought about by landing in a different country, I tried to become part of this country by joining its holidays.
The first year in the United States, when Thanksgiving was approaching, I decided to buy a turkey and to celebrate like everybody else. It seemed to me that I would “feel” the connection to people and to this land by stuffing myself with turkey (a delicacy back in Russia). However, the turkey and the cranberry sauce shared with a couple of our Russian friends did not bring about a miracle. I left the table physically stuffed, yet strangely empty.
I was teaching “survival English” to new immigrants in a business school program. My instinct as a teacher was to use the material(close to the cultural reality) both my students and were trying to embrace. So I found some very simple reading about the history of Thanksgiving (perhaps in my daughter’s textbook) and brought it to cultural that first year of my teaching it to my students. We learned about American cultural that first year of my teaching in the U.S. as a distant purely academic,”textbookish” content. We did some vocabulary exercises and exchanged a few turkey recipes. The words were barren of cultural and emotional meaning.
There is no better learning than teaching—and starting from that first years, I would enrich my teaching materials about Thanksgiving and expand the assignments to the students.Every year my students and I learned about the Pilgrims and the Indians, about Plymouth and discussing European and American history. Gradually, the feast of corn turkey, and cranberry acquired its historical, geographic and social-economic meaning. The etymology of the word “turkey” would become a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural adventure, a glance into my classroom languages and history, and an arena for anthropological and linguistic research. Sometimes my students would throw a multicultural Thanksgiving party, where, along with the traditional American turkey and vegetables, a variety of Eastern-European, Caribbean and Asian dishes would be displayed and enjoyed.
Every year, along with my students or on my own, I discovered more and more
about American history and of the history of native Americans. With my traveling around the country, my reading of American literature, meeting with real people, trying out real food , I was learning more and more about American history. Every year the Thanksgiving story helped me better articulate the beautiful myth reflecting the historical reality.
With time and learning, I left I belonged to that myth as well as other immigrants, following the Pilgrims. The more I learned about American Indians, the more I felt detached from the image I had formed of them back in Russia. Gradually the image of brave but wild warriors got substituted by the image of the real masters of this land ,who disappeared with their rich mysterious culture, only to give people like me their hospitality turkey ,corn and cranberries. As an outsider, I felt the story was an attempt to cover what really happened after the turkey had been eaten, but as an insider , I was grateful for the happy ending of the story ,because this legend helped perpetuate the American hospitality and openness to newcomers, which I myself had benefited from. I also felt that the story and the celebration, despite its Hollywood-like polt , makes Americans feel proud about their historical beginning, which was paradoxically someone else’s ending. I strongly felt American: simultaneously feeling both like the Pilgrims and the Indians.
Thanksgiving has become my holiday in essence and meaning , just like what it means to most American families: the connection we strive for. It makes us feel at home ,in a familiar environment rather than an alien one,and which creates the feeling fo security and of peace—an absolutely necessary emotional foundation of feeling of well-being. It is this sense of sitting at a dinner table with our lived ones ,lighting the candles, cooking an apple pie , drinking tea and smelling the familiar kitchen smells that we had been brought to life with ,raised with ,which come along with the primary sense of being alive.
I feel all this now ,discovering how my intellectual knowledge about this country has integrated my being via emotional channels. Perhaps we always start with the intellectual: reading , reflecting ,and communicating our reflections to other people. The cultural information, along with the motivation to survive emotionally, to get out of the immigrant crisis and of acculturation-related depression, of loneliness and of isolation ,works through the mind to the heart and together with real food and food for the soul ,becomes the source of release and relief. We feel in place and we share experiences. We have arrived. We are home.
