Holiday Celebrations in the Americas: Brazil and USA

For New Year's special of The HSE LooK we have been gathering winter holiday traditions from around the world and many of our findings were kindly shared by our international professors and postdocs. Today we present contributions from Brazil and the US!

Brazil

Renira Gambarato, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communications, Design and Media:
"I wish all of us a New Year with more stability and less uncertainty in Russia."

“Christmas in Brazil is in the middle of summer, not in winter, but the European traditions are still very strong. My family is of Italian origins, so our main tradition is to get together for Christmas. Not just very close relatives, but also uncles, cousins, grandmothers and grandfathers: everybody meets to celebrate the holiday together. Besides cooking a big suckling pig every single year, my family always comes up with a non-traditional Christmas tree. For example, last year it was done with origami.” 

USA

Seth Bernstein, Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II:
"I hope my colleagues are able to enjoy Russia and are able to treat the time they have here as a cultural experience as well as an intellectual opportunity at HSE."

“I really like holiday food, especially sweets and eggnog. When I taught in Ryazan I invited my students to my apartment for a holiday party where I made my own eggnog with real eggs. I don't think I managed to convince them that eggnog is delicious but at least no one got sick from raw eggs.

My dad is Jewish and my mother is Christian and they mostly observe Judaism. However, we do both regular Christmas and Jewish Christmas (a popular set of traditions among Jews in North America). Regular Christmas is just the normal secular gift-giving ritual that we do with my mother's family. Jewish Christmas is more fun though. We go to a movie every year and then get Chinese food. There are NBA games on TV all day so we watch those after we get home from the movie. I'm not sure where Jewish Christmas comes from, although lots of my Jewish friends observe it. My understanding is that we just do it because movie theaters and Chinese restaurants are the only things open at Christmas.” 

The full text of the issue can be found in The HSE LooK 10 (17), December 2014. If you are not on our regular mailing list yet, please subscribe and get fresh issues of bulletin every month!