Holiday Traditions: Laguna Style

“The family stays together and eats traditional foods, [like] fried rice. People do charity, like giving food
to people who have less…and praying together in a big field or stadium. is past time, after the prayer, we played a soccer game. It was a fun game, and the Christians played the Muslims. It was a tie.”

— Sulaiman Bah and Abdul Fatta Koroma

“I put my shoes out the night before. When I wake up, first thing in the morning, we go to our shoes, and Saint Nick has put a bunch of little treats in there. Traditionally, I get a pig, or fuzzy socks and some German knick-knacks.”

— Tiffany Yabsley

“I usually go to family parties and light reworks and use poppers, and we say goodbye to the previous year, as we take pictures in a photo booth. My family enjoys drinking champagne, but none for me of course. It’s the whole nine yards.”

— Sam Stegall

“I get together with my aunt on my mom’s side and some cousins, and we have a big Christmas feast – with even more food than we have at anksgiving. We have tamales and pozole, apple salad, pumpkin pie, really any Mexican food you can think of. e tamales are a really big tradition within my family.

We break into an assembly line: my dad rinses out the corn husk, someone else spreads the masa onto the corn husk, and someone else adds the meat, while someone else adds the sauce, and another person wraps them up and puts them in the pot – it takes forever!

My dad always says that if you make Mexican food while you’re mad, it won’t taste as good as when you’re making it when happy.”

— Zaira Paredes-Villegas

“I remember when I was young, maybe four or five, I actually had Chinese New Year in the countryside. When you go to the countryside, there are small houses and neighbors who know each other. You’re kind of a big family. Maybe you’re not really related, but the whole village, you all know each other, so you gather together.

They have dances, like traditional dance and traditional songs, and they just celebrate together, rather than in the city [where there are] just small families. They share maybe a whole pig and [make] maybe 10 dishes for their whole village. So the village would have a 100 tables and every table has maybe 10 people, and they just eat together and celebrate together.”

— Yunlong “Roth” Yin

“One thing I think is unique about my family is we like to collect menorahs, so every year we usually get a new one. Every night when I decorate the Hanukkah table, we take out the 20 menorahs that my parents have collected over their marriage and set them all out.

It’s really cool because some of them we haven’t used in a while, and we pick out which one we’re going to use each year.

We try to make them not normal. We have some pretty cool ones, like a train. We have one that’s a couple eating and the candles are coming out of the table.

They’re all pretty unique. We have one that looks like a keyboard and the letters of ‘Hanukkah’ have the candles coming out of them. at’s one thing we do that’s special I think.”

— Sully Israel