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itsallovernowL'shanah Tovah to all who are celebrating. Such a lovely holiday I think, sweetness on the new year before the preparations for repentence.
I continue my obsession with other people's rituals, getting a sort of giddy glow at hearing about all the things that people do to celebrate the holidays of their culture, their religion, their family. I have a bottomless pit of fascination for all this, and I am particularly thankful to the people in my life willing to answer (particularly today![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iamsab and company, although I never did find out the origin of lifting people up in chairs at a Jewish wedding).
Of the things that I love to hear about:
1. Taking communion
2. Making hot cross buns and having palm crosses
3. Wedding rituals - breaking the glass, processionals, feasts and quarantines, decoration of the body
4. Holiday rituals - particularly food and prayers, who you thank, who you remember, who you atone to
5. Personal versions of these same rituals.
6. Food restrictions or special foods for special days.
7. Singing
8. Birth rituals and child naming
Here is what my family does for all of those things: we get married in small ways, with homemade food. (We often do this by necessity, and frequently against the wishes of part of the families involved). We do a lot of eloping. We've done a fair number of shotgun ceremonies. The blessings of any god rarely come into play despite a fairly strong history of low key protestant faith.
We give birth in hospitals, and we name our kids after loved ones. We name our children things that they must take with them and live up to. I come from two gifts of god, and if finagled enough, that's what my name means as well.
We go to church intermittently. But we believe in something beyond what we can see. We believe strongly in the rituals we've created, in part to make up for the mishmash of ethnicities and cultures that shaped us. Plus, Scandinavians? They tend to have rituals that involve things that smell like antiseptic - ludefisk, Glogg, aquavit, lefsa.
We'll eat anything. Seriously. We sing, but rarely in praise of faith. But oh, we sing. (We often sing the wrong words though).
I continue my obsession with other people's rituals, getting a sort of giddy glow at hearing about all the things that people do to celebrate the holidays of their culture, their religion, their family. I have a bottomless pit of fascination for all this, and I am particularly thankful to the people in my life willing to answer (particularly today
iamsab and company, although I never did find out the origin of lifting people up in chairs at a Jewish wedding).Of the things that I love to hear about:
1. Taking communion
2. Making hot cross buns and having palm crosses
3. Wedding rituals - breaking the glass, processionals, feasts and quarantines, decoration of the body
4. Holiday rituals - particularly food and prayers, who you thank, who you remember, who you atone to
5. Personal versions of these same rituals.
6. Food restrictions or special foods for special days.
7. Singing
8. Birth rituals and child naming
Here is what my family does for all of those things: we get married in small ways, with homemade food. (We often do this by necessity, and frequently against the wishes of part of the families involved). We do a lot of eloping. We've done a fair number of shotgun ceremonies. The blessings of any god rarely come into play despite a fairly strong history of low key protestant faith.
We give birth in hospitals, and we name our kids after loved ones. We name our children things that they must take with them and live up to. I come from two gifts of god, and if finagled enough, that's what my name means as well.
We go to church intermittently. But we believe in something beyond what we can see. We believe strongly in the rituals we've created, in part to make up for the mishmash of ethnicities and cultures that shaped us. Plus, Scandinavians? They tend to have rituals that involve things that smell like antiseptic - ludefisk, Glogg, aquavit, lefsa.
We'll eat anything. Seriously. We sing, but rarely in praise of faith. But oh, we sing. (We often sing the wrong words though).
