Goal:

The aim of this project was to determine the ways in which American Christmas folklore is or isn’t widely adopted. Given the diversity of the American population, and how Christmas has become somewhat removed from its initial Christian origins, we were curious to see the ways in which people from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds engage with the holiday.

Collection methods:

We chose to take an open ended approach. We started by asking very general questions about Christmas and a vague theme (such as gifts or food). Our subsequent questions sought to focus on something the informant placed importance on, or talked extensively about. Although we could use some practice, we aimed to give voice to the informant and let them decide what was important to them without imposing our own bias. 

Division of work:

Each group member collected from roughly 5 informants, for a total of 35 items in this collection. Initially, we sought to collect under 5 distinct themes: food (Evan Fu), gifts(Julia Cross), decorations(Josh Betts), pop-culture(Sunaina Sekaran and Jackson McGinley) and general events and activities(Dylan Lawler and Danny Hincks). However, since not every informant engages in any or all of these categories, the boundaries of each sub-group became blurred. Additionally, the categories themselves are not distinct: gift giving traditions go hand-in-hand with decorating a tree (which would be gifts and decorations), for example. 

Conclusions:

Ultimately, much of the American Christmas experience is very similar across the country. Many informants referenced things such as a tree or Santa Claus or a large dinner that they assumed to be common knowledge. Even the timing of when to open gifts seemed to be widely understood. However, within each over-arching activity, it was interesting to see sub-groups of folk, whether that’s a family or cultural group, put their own twists on these pieces of folklore, eventually making new and more intricate folklore items.