Whether students spend the holidays hanging Christmas ornaments or playing family sports, they all have their own holiday traditions.
Vaidehee Patel, a political science major at Georgia State, dedicates Thanksgiving week to her extended family. Since she was little, her aunts, uncles, cousins, parents and siblings would gather in an Alabama motel that one of her aunts owned. The group of forty or fifty people would spend a week secluded from their work and outside lives and enjoy one another’s company.
Her aunt has since gotten rid of the motel, but the tradition continues at one of the relatives’ Smyrna houses.
“We had a couple cousins who took classical Indian dancing, so they’d
usually set up a huge routine and then do a dance,” Patel said. “Then my uncle would dress up as a woman, and he would get in and everyone would gather in one room and dance and laugh and sing.”
The other highlight of her Thanksgiving week is the food. Her aunts whip up vegetable dishes and her uncles create meat dishes. These dishes are all Indian recipes.
“They’ll usually have a set menu,” Patel said. “But really it’s just a hodgepodge of everything.”
Holly Henson, a senior marketing and finance major, also spends her holidays with her large family. One of the traditions that brought them together involved Christmas tree ornaments. With a mother who’s been picky about decorating the tree, the Hensons have always ended up with a beautiful sight.
“We string it with lights and take pearl strings from costume jewelry,” Henson explained. “We also have glass bells and angels that she’s collected over the years.”
Henson’s mother also made a point of buying her daughters ornaments for their future families, so their Christmas tree holds sets of matching ornaments, like glass fish and ballet dancers.
While shopping for ornaments one Christmas season, the Hensons stumbled across a glass pickle ornament. The shopkeeper gave Henson and her mother an idea for a new tradition. Now every Christmas, her family sets up the tree and her father sneaks the pickle ornament on when no one was looking. Whichever of the kids found the pickle receives a prize, such as a $10 bill or a chocolate orange.
“Every day we would just hang out looking for it,” Henson said. “My brother would always find it and he would drive my sister and I insane! He was just so good at it.”
Now that Henson and her two siblings are older, they stopped the tradition. But they passed it down to their young nieces and nephews, who have taken on the challenge.
Political science major Lucy Felker and her family use their size to their advantage on the holidays. The family of twelve––ten kids plus mom and dad––spend Thanksgiving morning channeling their competitive sides in games like soccer, tennis, two-hand touch football and baseball.
“My dad is really competitive and crazy, and when we mess up he calls us ‘commi-red pinkos,’ which I think is an insult from the Cold War,” Felker said.
Full of energy and excitement, the games can sometimes go awry; her siblings have been hit by a baseball more than once.
The traditions continue after the games when her whole family reads the Bible, prays and works to make a bonfire and clean up for the dinner crowd. Her mother invites people from their church, work and schools who don’t have family to spend the holidays with for dinner.
“There’s always a bunch of random people celebrating with us,” she said.
The night ends with just their family drinking and talking together over an old, usually Western, movie.
“We love the ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ mainly because Steve McQueen was my dad’s favorite actor and my mom loved Yul Brynnar. But we all liked the action.”
