Good-bye to folklore, and good-bye through folklore!

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else." ~Tom Stoppard

It's the final day for many of my classes, including folklore, and this is likely to be my final post in this blog. I've enjoyed the experience and hope to continue to develop my skills in identifying and interpreting folklore in American culture. Already I've noticed quite a few folkloric traditions going on around campus in conjunction with the final day of the semester at BYU. Read through and see if you agree with me that any combination of these items is a sure-fire sign that the semester has come to its conclusion.

1. Food. Many people are walking around with plates of cookies, brownies, lasagna, what-have-you desserts. I can only assume that every class at BYU has decided to have an end-of-the-semester party on the final day of classes. It's a pretty common thing for language classes, I know. Almost every Spanish class I've taken has ended with a fiesta. This semester my Spanish 311 class ended on Tuesday, and we all brought something to eat. Two of the students served missions in Spain and brought Spanish desserts: Arroz con leche (Rice, milk, and sugar) and, of course, the famous flan. They were both delicious, but almost overwhelmingly sweet. I was thankful for the regular carrots and pretzels brought by another classmate and myself.

2. Professors crying! Typically women professors, but I have seen men professors do it too. They may do it while they're bearing their testimony, or talking about how young and bright we students are, or just getting emotional about the topic they're teaching. One thing is sure: You definitely know that it's the final day of class when your professor is crying...

3. Students leaving class and NOT saying, "See you later!" It's almost hard to think of what to say if you aren't having the final in the same classroom together. "Good luck!" seems vague. "Have a great Christmas!" is a little brusque. "Good luck with finals!" is probably the most commonly acceptable phrase, but, then, of course, it's cliché. Oh well.

4. Singing "God Be With You Til We Meet Again" for the opening/closing hymn. I've heard it twice for religion classes already, and it makes me feel uneasy and sort of guilty. It's as if they're trying to make us forget how crazily excited we are at the chance to be FINISHED with school, just by sobering us down and forcing us to be sad and all nostalgic...

5. Clapping for the professor. This is typically only done in the big freshman classes, like American Heritage, but I like the tradition and so have tried to initiate it in smaller classes, like Spanish 311 for instance. It's nice to let the professor know he or she has your respect and appreciation, even if it does seem a bit of a formality.

Feel free to write in the comments if you come up with any more traditions you think may be lurking around in this category. On that note, I'd like to let everyone who has commented know that I have really have greatly appreciated all the comments. Thanks a lot for your support and interest in my doings as a college student here at the Y! And if by chance you've become addicted to my flawless writing style and charismatic sense of humor, don't worry. I'll be starting another blog next winter while I'm completing a seminar and internship in Washington D.C., the great capital of this grand ol' American nation of ours. Waaaaaahooooooooo!

Top Twelve Moments in Folklore Class!

"Have you heard of the funky chicken?"~Professor Rudy

Recently, my teacher mentioned that she had a few favorite moments from the times we have shared together in folklore class. We haven't been together quite long enough to form a high context group with specific folklore items among us, but we have become comfortable enough with each other to be able to share some funny and interesting moments together. Her comment inspired me to make my own list of my most memorable moments in our folklore class.

1. The day we studied folklore songs and listened to a tape recording of "Babes in the Woods," and made fun of it after class to such an extent that I couldn't think of any other song all day. Aaraaaargh!

2. The day someone mentioned there being a Seinfield episode all about bad Indian proverbs, causing me to spend several fruitless hours searching through their archives in hopes of finding it.

3. The day we listened to taped sleepover stories in class, after which I confirmed my childhood suspicion that these stories were not only too often nasty and untrue, but could be incessantly repetitive and tedious.

4. The day we watched almost all of the Disney version of Johnny Appleseed! I had never seen it before, but became an instant fan.

5. The day we watched some of American Tongues, a video about various American dialects of English, and one which I had already seen in English Language 322 that semester. It's a great video, and I really enjoyed seeing it twice to pick up on things that I had missed the first time.

6. The food presentation days were very fun; I can't pretend to have the necessary skills to rank our groups, but I will say that I was very impressed with the Potato, Peanuts, and Pineapple groups; I learned more about the food group from their brief, colorful, outlined presentation than I learned from any of the food groups we had to read about in the book. Packaging truly does make a difference! (As does the letter "P," it would seem - my own group, Peaches, also did quite well, I think)

7. The day we watched a movie about home movies: I've always loved looking back at our old home movies from the 1950s, and wish that Mom and Dad would have made some of us as kids. Oh well, we still have plenty of pictures and room on our digital cameras for movies. There's something really neat about seeing the way a regular American family lived some 50 years ago. It's like time travel!

8. The day we all came up with short family stories, wrote inventive titles on the board, and told a select few by popular class request. I wrote "Lost" for my title, but I think now I could have been a little more creative - maybe something more like "Possible encounter with one of the 3 Nephites!" The stories that were told were pretty fun, though. My favorite was that of a boy who wrote "Mom and the elephant" (interestingly enough, there was another story called "Mom and the kangaroo" - we never did find out what it was): Apparently his family went on a vacation to the other side of the world, where they rode elephants. While they were standing on the ground, however, a guide stood behind the boy's mother and made gestures for the elephant to put his trunk between her legs and lift her up. She didn't notice until she was in the air screaming!

9. This happened on many days: I will always remember my teacher asking for a tall volunteer to put the projector cord over the whiteboard so she won't have to write around it. I'll also always remember her writing the phrases "Folklore = the study of tradition," "Esoteric/Exoteric factor," and "Twin laws" on the white board. She also always made a very useful list of our reading and writing assignments for next day's class on one end of the board.

10. The day I purposely changed where I sat to see if and how it would affect the way other people sat: THREE PEOPLE MOVED, folks, thus proving my hypothesis that change brings tension and consistency provides stability...or something like that. It was just a fun little experiment.

11. The day our professor taught us what the "funky chicken" was. If you don't already know, I'm sorry. It's confidential BYU folklore. Look it up in Special Collections if you must pry.

12. The day we had to stand and sing the Cougar Fight song in class, even if the only words we knew were "Rah, rah, rah-rah-rah!" To this day, I'm not quite sure what that was all about, except to demonstrate the ignorance of the majority regarding supposedly universally "BYU" traditions.

What your doodle says about your noodle...

"Doodling is the brooding of the mind." Harper Book of Quotations

While sitting next to people in college classes for the past three years, I've noticed that everyone tends to have specific habits and patterns in the way that they take notes. Some people bend studiously over their notebooks and never look up to see if the teacher is pointing or making a facial expression (this is me in my Sis. Black's religion class; she talks fast and all of the details are fair game for the tests). Some people scribble a note or two, then wait ten minutes, then maybe write another line. Some people draw big fancy titles and headings, but keep the notes to a bare minimum. Some don't even take notes - after all, what are tape recorders, friends with laptops, and good memories for?

As I thought about the way that different people take notes, I became curious about what constitutes my own pattern of note-taking, particularly over the past semester. So I dug up my notebooks for the Fall 08 semester and looked through them to see if I could find out more about my life as a college student. I tried to be objective. I asked myself, what would an archeologist or sociologist say about me if all he or she had to look at were my college notebooks?

My conclusions:

1. Whenever I want to emphasize something important, I underline it or make a star inside a circle next to it. If it's very important, I might do both. My notebooks are literally covered in underlined words and circles with stars inside of them. Meaning I should practically be bursting with all the knowledge I've acquired, right?

2. I'm not the most consistent of note-takers. I switch pretty regularly from cursive to print (although print is much more common in all of my notes), from capital letters in the middle of sentences (not in the middle of words, thank goodness!) to lower case letters at the beginning of sentences. Insecurity, perhaps? Stupidity? An expression of defiance against "the Man"?

3. I sometimes write outside the lines. I never mean to - but it happens.

4. I like punctuation and use it a lot - semicolons, colons, commas, exclamation points, question marks, hyphens, bullet points, the works. I'll even draw a smiley face if I particularly like a quote or something.

5. Though I don't do it often, with some classes I write down verbatim "quotes" from my professor. Only when they're really too fun to forget. I'll share two quick examples from my Honors 304R film professor Darl Larsen: "I think this class is just an excuse to watch movies and talk about them." "Next time you watch a movie, think about the editing. It will drive you nuts!"

6. I tend to doodle in classes that don't require a lot of brainwork. That means I have a lot of doodles in Humanities and Folklore, and hardly any in my Religion and ELang classes. And what are these doodles of, you may ask? Many things, it turns out.
Hairstyles. Dogs. Horses. Houses. Ballet dancers (I used to take ballet and am still very fond of the grace and beauty of it). Occasionally figures that we're talking about in class (yes, I have a sketch of J. Alfred Prufrock in my Humanities notes, and a doodle of a cherry on a sundae next to my notes on the Cherry group's food presentation in Folklore class). I also draw trees, flowers, and fancily decorated cupcakes. I like things with a lot of detail in them.

7. All my notes (except for a few rare cases in ELang, where I need a pencil because I make mistakes on our exercises) are in pen. I like pen because it will last and it won't break and it's good and dark - easy to see. At the end of every semester, I like to compile all of my class notes and class assignments together in a binder, and the pen makes me feel as if my work is slightly more permanent (although, embarrassingly, the doodles are also permanent). In the future I would like to take a note-taking class offered by BYU; it might even be useful to learn some shorthand if I ever decide to take another class from the speedy talking but thoroughly engaging religion professor Susan Black.

Presenting the one and only...

"Uncle!" "Nephew!" ~Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

It has come to my attention that there is a lot of folklore to be fleshed out with regard to my uncle, the famous "Unc." He is, as I have said, my mother's only brother, and was for a long time unmarried, which left him plenty of time to come and visit us every Christmas in our home in Georgia. Though I love all my uncles, it was always nice having a special uncle who didn't have any kids and could devote all his time to us. Until he got married, of course. But by that time we had already moved to Utah, and visiting would have been difficult anyway.

But enough of the sad times - it's time for the Potluck Unc Folklore Fest!

UNC PHOTOS

We have many photos of Unc, but I only downloaded one of him and my mom, on our most recent vacation to "The Farm," which is what we call the old house where Unc lives in Johnson City, Tennessee. Can you see the family resemblance? I wish we had pictures of Unc doing what I remember him doing when we were little - pillow fights, carrying us on his shoulders, making scary faces, etc. But I guess the standard "Cheese" and click photos are better than nothing.

UNC MEMORIES

First, here is an amusing journal entry of mine which I found from when I was ten years old:

"December 23, 1998: Unc came! He seems to be very tall to me. I feel sad that he is going away on Christmas Day, but Dad says that is what happens when you get friends (girlfriends). Yuuuuuughhhhhhheeaaiiou! Ugh. Without Unc, it wouldn't be Christmas."

Second, the most famous funny story we have regarding Unc occurred several years ago when he wrote us an email, signed his name "Unc," ran spell-check, and sent it to us, failing to notice that the computer had changed "Unc" into "Ounce." We still laugh about getting an email from someone named "Ounce" to this day.

UNC EXPRESSIONS

Unc has a very distinct Southern accent, more so than my mom, I think, and his normal voice is a rather slow, soft-spoken drawl. When he's teasing, he'll either make his voice squeaky and nasal, or low-pitched and grumbly. And no one can say these phrases exactly the way that Unc does, although we have tried.

"It IS...?"
"Who's this?"
"That's right."

UNC TRADITIONS

The "Wild Child": Just as I developed a special name for Unc, he developed a special name for me - the "Wild Child." I'm not as wild or as childish anymore, and he doesn't use it as much, but if I remind him, which I like to do for fun, he will.

Presents: When he came to visit us in Georgia, Unc always brought presents, but occasionally he would pretend to have forgotten to buy them or bring them with him. Once he managed to smuggle them into the house before I could sneak outside and rummage through the car in search of them.

Late birthday cards: Unc used to send each of the children in my family a birthday card on his or her birthday. Now, he may or may not send us a card, but if he does, we know that it will arrive late and be one of the cards that has a "Sorry I missed your birthday" theme. We keep our birthday cards and hang them up every year, and we joke that we can always tell which ones are Unc's merely by looking for a phrase like "I can't believe..." "I'm sorry..." or "I hope your birthday was..."

Phone call: Unc still calls Mama on her birthday every year, which I think is sweet. She also calls him on his birthday, and they always talk for a couple of hours.

Tricks: This is by far the most famous of the traditions associated with Unc's coming, and the one which we most looked forward to as kids when planning the visit. The idea is to stage either an elaborate, creative, and foulproof "trick," which usually ended in the form of a pillow hitting Unc, or something like that. I think it was begun by my oldest brother Joseph, but we all readily followed his lead - in fact, one year I recall Unc having to go through the routine four separate times! We keep the tricks much simpler now that we're a little older and Unc doesn't come to visit as often. An old "classic" is to have one child wait with a stack of pillows on the staircase above the front door, have another child ring the doorbell, and then drop the pillows on Unc when he walks towards the door. I tried it just last August when we visited Unc on vacation, and it worked pretty well, so I guess this trick is a definite keeper!

Completing this entry reminds me how much folklore actually has to do with people other than traditions, and why we are drawn to traditions because of the happy memories, family members, and friendships we associate with them. I can't make it possible for my children to have an "Unc" the way I did, but I will gladly share with them the memories and stories. I absolutely love Unc and can't thank him enough for making my childhood extra fun and exciting.

Christmas won't be Christmas without...FOLKLORE!

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." ~Jo March

There are certain things I can't imagine not having at Christmastime in the Miller family. Some of them are obvious, some of them less so, but every single one of them is needed - kind of like the ingredients in Christmas cheesecake, or the individual snowflakes in a snowman, or the number of blood cells in... okay, never mind. Here's my list:

1. Unc needs to be there. Unc is my mother's only (younger) brother who lives in Tennessee. His real name is "George Valentine DeVault," which became "Val DeVault," which became "Uncle Val," from which I - I am inordinately proud of my role in this bit of family folklore - derived his famous nickname forever after: "Unc." It caught on very quickly, and now is so engrained into our family that even my mom and dad will occasionally say "Unc" rather than "Val" when he isn't there. He lives in Tennessee and used to come and visit us every year at Christmas when we lived in Georgia. He brought pound cake, he brought presents, he brought his Labrador dogs, but most importantly, he brought himself. He doesn't come anymore now that we live in Utah, and he's married, but I still miss him every year.

2. Every single decoration we own must be put up. Nothing must be allowed to languish in the closet. Old ornaments with any degree of sentimental value must be repaired and reused until they are no longer distinguishable from the tape that holds them together.

3. We must sing our traditional family program, "Walk in Sunlight," on Christmas Eve. Every member of the immediate family must be present. The large cut-out cardboard animals from my mom's ambitious days as a Primary leader must also be in attendance. Dressing up is encouraged for the kids, but no longer mandatory, I think.

4. We must watch "A Child's Christmas in Wales" on Christmas Eve before dinner. Out of all the Christmas movies I have seen, this remains my very favorite, although it may well be my associations of happy times while watching it that make it seem like such a wonderful movie to me. Whatever the case may be, I certainly intend to carry on this tradition in my family, and am fairly certain that some of my other siblings will as well.

5. We must eat the exact same meals every year on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. No alterations or variations whatsoever! And, if at all possible, there is to be no making of this food on any other day of the year - Christmas food shall come but once a year.

6. The stockings must be hung in the bedroom, or close by, and are to be filled, not with toys, but with food for Christmas lunch. This is always a special treat, as it's such fun to wake up early and guess what items will be in the stockings. From years of past experience, we have come to recognize that Santa has a few pretty regular items on the menu, but he has been known to vary it from time to time with unexpected tidbits (my very favorite year was when I got a stuffed penguin in my stocking in addition to the lunch - my, that was like Christmas morning PLUS a Tooth Fairy visit).

7. I - this is a personal issue - must wake up AT LEAST two hours in advance to 6 am, the established hour when we may all sneak upstairs to see what Santa Claus has brought. There's simply no fun at all in sleeping in late on Christmas and losing all that wonderful time of early morning anticipation. Plus when else in the day will you have time to read your scriptures, pore over the last of the Christmas books, complete the ritualistic "checking the stocking" tradition, and ooh and aah over every item and giggle with your siblings about plans for the day.

8. We do our best to watch all of our Christmas movies, but there are certain movies that absolutely MUST be watched in order to make a complete Christmas. Some of them must even be watched at a certain time. In my opinion, these are:

The King is Born (watched the Sunday before Christmas, always)
It's a Wonderful Life (watched the Friday before Christmas, always)
Miracle on 34th Street (the OLD version, usually watched just after Thanksgiving, to get us through the transition of holiday moods)
A Christmas Carol (from 1938 - despite its somewhat censored plot, the screenplay, music, and casting is so wonderful that this is is our favorite version)
The Little Drummer Boy (usually watched the second Sunday before Christmas; it never fails to make my mom cry, and last year it even made me cry, so I guess the tradition is catching on)

9. Every sibling needs to be present. With my oldest brother at Duke University, and my next oldest siblings serving missions in the past two years, it's been a long time since all of our siblings have been together. I'm looking forward to the reunion this Christmas!

10. We have to draw names of siblings, and buy the sibling a present, usually under $20. This was a much more important tradition when I was younger, and obsessed with counting the number of presents I would receive. But we still do it today, and I still like it, so there.

11. We have an empty basket which we are supposed to fill with straws ("good deeds" which we do for each other) from December 1 to cushion the basket for Baby Jesus. I'm sad to say that this tradition appears to be dwindling away, as we usually forget to put in straw or forget to do good deeds, and end up dumping in the whole bag of straw on Christmas Eve anyway. But I still think it's a cute idea, and I'd like to do it with my own children.

12. We always leave out a piece of fruit for Santa every year, by the chimney. We may leave milk, too, but it depends.

Fellow family members, feel free to add what you think needs to be added to make the perfect Miller Family Christmas ever!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!!! (Except for the turkey)

"For what we are about to eat, may the Lord may us truly thankful. Amen." ~Maria (The Sound of Music)

For the past three Thanksgivings, I have usually spent a great deal of time at the library or on the computer working on homework for my classes. This year I was lucky (or blessed) to not have any pressing assignments on Thursday. We didn't do anything particularly special until dinner (other than put up the usual Thanksgiving decorations, which rather pale in comparison with the black/orange paper chains and Japanese lanterns we usually make for Halloween, and of course, the coating of Christmas cards and paper decorations which adorn the house for the entire month of December). For our dinner, we had what we always have - turkey, gravy, rice, succotash (lima beans mixed with corn), cranberry fruit Jell-O, cornbread, green beans, and... did I forget anything? For dessert we always have pumpkin pie and whipped cream. When we lived in Georgia, we used to make our pumpkin pie from our home-grown pumpkins and whip our own whipped cream, but alas! No longer. When in Orem, do as the Oremites - go to Wal-Mart. Plus we already used up our scant supply of pumpkins for Halloween.

As we eat the Thanksgiving meal, it is a tradition for our dad to read us the slips of paper that we have written on all month, telling what we are grateful for. As he reads them, we try to guess who wrote them. It seems like a fairly predictable game at times, but I never get tired of it. And I suppose God never gets tired of hearing us say "Thank you" either.

After the Thanksgiving meal, we watched Thanksgiving movies - a later version of a Thanksgiving Waltons episode, and Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown! And then pumpkin pie and whipped cream. No football, no Macy's Parade on TV, no group family pictures, but it was a lovely Thanksgiving all the same.

Reflections on the Folklore Project

"The first time I pulled an all-nighter in college was when I had to finish my folklore project for this class." ~Jill Rudy, our professor

Today the biggest assignment we will have in our American Folklore class is due: the folklore project, a collection of 10-12 folklore items in relation to a theme of our choice, and a 6-8 page cover essay analyzing and synthesizing our findings. As you can imagine, I have been rather close to the computer as of late. In addition to writing and compiling the project with a nice cover page, table of contents, and autobiographical sketch, we had to present our projects to the class. I took brief notes on the presentations, as I was interested in seeing what my classmates had chosen to study. Here's a quick run-through of the topics presented on by our class:

Americans living overseas
September 11 experiences
Experiences in a freshman dorm at BYU
Old wives' tales about cures
Stories about a secret gold mine in Utah
Versions of a story called "Taily-po"
Folklore among "World of Warcraft" players (Surprisingly very convincing and interesting approach - he even connected it to the American experience!)
Breakfast-making traditions (My friend sitting next to me did this one)
Experiences in high school
Experiences at the Jerusalem Center
Roommate horror stories (I want to read this project!)
Wisdom teeth removal stories (Another attention-grabbing one...)
Halloween costumes (My friend on the other side of me did this one)
Football traditions (Another surprisingly interesting one)
Folklore associated with the Spirit of Ricks
Engagement stories (Done by a guy! A married guy!)
Songs...(It was a rather...um...broad project)
Small town lore (This one was funny, since it turned out that two girls in the class were from the same small town being discussed: It's a small world, after all!)
American LDS Wedding Traditions (It wasn't until this moment that I realized the girl who was presenting it was married)

And finally, there was my project - Variations on Hand Actions for Latter-day Saint Primary Children's Songs. I raced through my presentation, but had a nice PowerPoint slide and got to cover a lot of what I wanted to. The project itself was surprisingly enjoyable, until it came to the last days of doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer, typing everything up. I had fun interviewing people and learned several things which surprised me in the process: First of all, there was so much variety in the actions! Everyone had small differences in their version of the basic actions, and a few people did things I never would have imagined, like coming up with a new verse to a song with complete actions.

Second, people seemed fine talking to me or even with the tape recorder present, but many got skittish when I suggested filming their actions with the camera. I ended up only videotaping four people, and two of them were related to me, so I kind of forced them into it. And I didn't even show any videos to the class - I just watched them to get material for the cover paper. I used the tape recorder for all my other interviews, and took as many notes as I could, although I had to keep talking or else they would become nervous again and stop talking... Isn't it ironic how people stop talking when you actually want them to talk, and vice versa... Ok. Never mind.

Third, a lot of people had very firm opinions about when hand actions should and should not be used, and the appropriateness of sign language, and so on. Before conducting the project, I didn't really consider what kind of opinion I had myself, or if it was even necessary for me to have one on such a relatively unimportant issue, but as I encountered so many different, firmly founded viewpoints, I soon became aware of what I did and did not like, and the issue ended up becoming important to me as well. I am a big fan of Primary song actions, and hope we always have them. I would even like to expand the number of songs with actions; that "Follow the Prophet" one would really benefit from having actions to sort out all the different verses.