Chapman: We’re from Belize, so we don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving. But we do celebrate

Both: Christmas!

Do you have any traditions for Christmas time?

Gillette: You cook a whole pile of food, a lot of food, and your neighbors come to visit you. I’m from a village, and there’s the Christmas Brown.

Chapman: It’s like a jam session, I guess you could call it. It’s like folklore — traditional Belizean music — and you get together and you just, you know, jam.

Gillette: And you feed the musicians and anyone who comes with them. So there’s black cake, white cake, fanta.

Like the soda?

Gillette: Yeah, the soda! Rumpopo.

Chapman: Rumpopo! It’s eggnog, but we spike it with rum. It’s real popular during that time.

Do you have any special memories around that time?

Chapman: It’s all about family, really. That’s the main thing. Extended family, cousins, uncles.

Gillette: With the tradition of having people come to your house, your neighbor, or anyone who pops in, you offer them a plate of food. One little boy came with these musicians and my mother set slices of cake on the table for all the big people. [The boy] was about 10, and all of a sudden we saw him piling on everything [to his plate] and he cleared off everything! My mother had to step in and say, “Remember, there are other people here that need to eat.” It was a lot of, “Don’t bring that little boy back here again.”

Do you have any weird or funny Thanksgiving or holiday traditions?

Hooker: We had cats so we couldn’t really have a tree because they’d tear it down, so we used some tinsel and garner on the wall out of their reach.

Korchak: I have one uncle that used to always wear overalls with no shirt and would always take a bath for like at least 3 hours in our bath tub and nap. And once during Thanksgiving, he rolled up his shorts really, really high and walked in the pool and just stood there with a beer.

Why?

Korchak: Just for kicks.

Did you just have a normal dinner afterwards?

Korchak: Yeah. Everything was cool.

Do you have any weird or funny Thanksgiving or holiday traditions?

My family is Mexican-American, so we don’t really do Thanksgiving. But this year we decided we are going to. So we’re just gonna have a traditional dinner with turkey, and potatoes and things like that.

Why’d you decide to celebrate this year?

Since we usually don’t my brother requested that we did — because this is probably his last year living at home with us — so he wanted to do a traditional thing.

Do you have any weird/funny Thanksgiving/holiday traditions?

Hernandez: My family doesn’t eat turkey, we eat pig because we’re Hispanic. But we still have stuffing, just without the turkey. I guess there aren’t a lot of turkeys in Cuba.

Cruz: I’m half Filipino, so we have a mix of Filipino food and American stuff. Turkey, ham, pork too. But we also have mashed potatoes and rice. We don’t have a sit down dinner, we have a more of a buffet style. So we bless the food on the table and get a plate and get up in line and start doing that. And then we sit down in the living room and watch football, and all the moms sit at the dining table and gossip about the past year I guess.

Phillips: I think everybody in the family helps cook. Just everyone. There is no memory of me not helping cook food. When we go to our grandparents’, they usually don’t cook. We cook for them. I have had very few meals with my grandma where it’s just my grandma cooking. We showed up, and now we have to cook food.

Do you have any special memories attached to Thanksgiving or the holidays?

Cruz: I went to the Philippines last year. It was the third time I’ve been, but it’s been like 10 years since I last went.

Phillips: My family usually plays card games and board games during holidays. I just remember one time — it’s really hard to beat my grandma at Scrabble — but one time I beat her and she was so upset. She like cussed me out. It was great.

Hernandez: Most of my family only speaks Spanish, except for my parents and my brother. And since I’m coming to school in Jacksonville, not a lot of people are Hispanic, and I went home and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. I had forgotten all of my Spanish. And I got cussed out by my grandparents for it.

Did you understand that?

Hernandez: Yeah. I was hanging out with too many “yee-haws.”

Phillips: Sorry we’re too southern for you.

Do either of you have weird or funny Thanksgiving stories?

Jackson: My whole family goes to my aunt’s house in Jacksonville every year, and there’s usually like 85-90 people over and we all make something and bring it over. It’s kind of like our family reunion every year.

Haire: I’m vegetarian, so I don’t really ever eat anything [at Thanksgiving]. And my family all always judge me because my plate only has a roll on it.

Do you have any special memories surrounding the holidays?

Haire: We always go to North Carolina, because it’s like meeting in the middle for my family. We have a lot of north family and a lot of southern family.

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