The Decibel - What’s the holiday season without a little tradition?

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Ranging from childhood phone calls, to serenading strangers, to feasting on the darkest day of the year, we explore how traditions help connect us and celebrate the season.To end the year, we wanted to take a break from the endless cycle of bad news and share with you a series of stories about holiday traditions.This episode orginally aired on December 23, 2022.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Most of us celebrate the holidays with some kind of tradition. Whether those are annual plans that involve the whole family or simpler routines with friends, traditions often make this time of year feel special. So today, we're playing an episode from 2022 about different traditions and how they help us celebrate the season. Hope you enjoy it. It's 19 minutes away from 12 o'clock now with Santa Claus in for David Lawrence on WMAL AM 630. So one of our producers, Maddie, is here today to talk to me. Maddie, what are we listening to here? We are listening to a bit of family history for me.

This is a tape that is now like 32 years old and it is literally a tape. My mother had to dig out an old cassette and then drive to her church and use the cassette player there to record this for us. And I have been given the privilege of talking to Santa, Mr. Santa Claus himself, on the radio. So this was like a call-in show, which is where literally we'd have to dial the old landline with its, like, 50-foot cord. So I remember our main phone was in the kitchen, and so I was probably standing somewhere in the living room,

and we'd listen to ourselves on the radio, and I think you can even hear a little bit of the echo in the recording itself. Let's go to Matty in Bethesda. Hello, Mattie, how are you? Good. All right, Mattie, you're how old? Five. Five years old. And Mattie... For many, many years, we used to play this, I think on Christmas Day itself,

possibly on Christmas Eve. And basically, we would just listen back to it and laugh laugh at five-year-old me and then especially laugh at my sister who is two in this and makes a special guest appearance about halfway through the chat I have with Santa. Make them more comfortable what's going on there? My sister. How old is your sister? Two. Two years old. She's screaming at the top of her lungs.

Do you remember being that five-year-old kid on the line with Santa? You know, kind of. I have. I can definitely remember my apartment in Bethesda, Maryland, where we were living at the time. I remember its beige walls.

I do remember its beige walls. I do remember being really excited. All right, Maddie, what would you like for Christmas? I would like a Cabbage Patch Kid. A Cabbage Patch Kid? I've got some of those lying about, sure. And a Cabbage Patch Kid Cradle. Oh, and a Cradle for the Cabbage Patch Kid. So this is obviously a very memorable family tradition then, Maddie. Is this where you got the idea of this holiday traditions episode that we're going to hear today,

where we've got different traditions and things that people do from across Canada? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this tape is too good not to share with the world. That is true. All right. Well, let's get into it. Should we do our usual thing? Yeah, let's do this. I'm Anika Ramon-Wilms. And I'm Madeline White. And you're listening to The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Well, Merry Christmas to everybody at your house.

Okay. Bye-bye now. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. Let's go. Lawrence is lining up some more phone calls. This is Santa Claus infidavit on WMAL AM 630.

The phone number is... Music is one of my favorite parts of the holiday season. When I was younger, I used to sing in Christmas concerts, and it was always so much fun. The caroling that you just heard was from Maria Joy Bartholomew. She lives in Halifax, but spoke to us from London, Ontario, about her lifelong caroling tradition. Yeah, it's a good story. It's part of our family tradition and something I was literally kind of born into. It started in Halifax in 1984. My dad at the time was a naval officer. He was very musical and a bachelor and all of his friends

were thinking of maybe something fun to do near Christmas time. So they thought that it would host a caroling party for neighbors and friends. And at that time, he had just met my mom. And so that was the first kind of night that they fell in love. So it's also part of our family story. And some of my earliest memories as a child are actually caroling because it was something that happened every year. And there was a very kind of predictable rhythm to it. But I remember being so little, I'd be on my dad's shoulders and he'd be leading the caroling and I'd have this beautiful like perch looking at everyone. It started by just going to random strangers' houses. They started in Halifax and and then they moved to Ottawa,

and then Kingston, and then London, Ontario. When I moved back to Halifax a few years ago, my brother was living there too. We kind of reinstated the Halifax version of it. And now it is, like, often just to random people. Happy New Year, the darlings we bring to you and your kin. And so, I mean, this year, will the tradition continue on as it has every year then? Yes. Yep. COVID stopped things for the last two years.

So, but this year we can get, you know, back together. And it'll be, it'll also be kind of a special well bittersweet for us my my father who started it passed away from cancer at the very beginning of covid so this is the first year the first year that we'll be carrying on the tradition without him so that'll be um yeah that it's definitely a huge loss but i'm also so grateful for the you know the gift he gave us of starting this with my mom. So, yeah, it will be special. And I'm glad we'll carry it on again, even though COVID, you know, we had to pause for a couple of years. Glad tidings for Christmas and a happy new year. Merry Christmas!

They're carrying on the tradition. You guys just pals who sing. We're dropouts from Juilliard. So you've been to a lot of houses over the years, but is there any kind of interaction that I guess really sticks out in your mind? Is something special? Probably the most, like definitely the most impacting was a few years ago in Halifax. It was a cold, wintry night, lots of Halifax slush and snow.

And we knocked on this beautiful old home. And it wasn't even that lit, but something was like, oh, we should carol to this home. And this older gentleman opened the door and immediately just started kind of tearing up and then motioning for us to come in the house. And we've never like, we've never gone into a home before. And it felt like this moment of, do we do this? We're all in

the midst of singing. But something was like, yes, absolutely. This is, it's important. So we did. We just started kind of walking into the home, trying to take our boots off so we wouldn't get this beautiful old floors wet and he led us down the hallway into what would have been the living room you could see family portraits all over and um set up like a living room but with a bed in the center and a woman like lying there i presume his wife based on all the pictures around um and she was yeah she was very very frail at the end of the song and he yeah he said that you know his wife was very sick and she had really all she wanted was to go to a christmas concert and hear music that season but she wasn't able you know she wasn't able to get out of bed and so he said this is a miracle you've brought the christmas concert he brought the concert to us.

So that was really, like, really incredibly touching for us to be a part of. It felt like this moment that was kind of beyond anything that we set out to do. But I'll always remember that moment of us, pure strangers, gathered together, standing around, fully around this woman's bed, and her husband was beside her holding her hand. And for all of the awkwardness of knocking on strangers' doors, there's also some magic there too that was really profound. So I'll never forget that.

And people, yeah, I'll never forget that experience for sure, that you never know. You never know what can happen hello my name is Samira Moyadin around this time year, Iranians celebrate what is known as Yalda. Yalda is a Syriac word, which means birth. And this festival celebrates the eve of the birth of Mitra, who is the sun god. The celebration is all about light triumphing over darkness, and it happens on the eve of the longest night of the year. This celebration is better known as winter solstice.

So you gather around a table, and on that ceremonial table is things like pomegranates, persimmons. We also make this really rich, thick soup called oshireshte. Candles are a big thing, and you have to keep that light going all night, right into the dawn. And what we do is we sit around the table, we tell stories, but most of all we read poetry. Now you can read any type of poetry you like, but one of the poets that we read a lot is Hafez. Hafez was a 14th century poet. He wrote a lot about love and light and red wine and religious hypocrisy.

One of the lyrics is, Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky. This tradition means a lot to me because it's something that predates a lot of the sort of more established religions and is something that is really in tune with the seasons. And the way it manifests itself today is something that brings all Iranians together. It doesn't matter what your religious, cultural, or lingual background is, it sort of grounds you and I guess brings you back to nature. It lets you come out of that dreariness of winter and lets you look forward to spring.

And no matter what happens, we always know that the seasons will change. And I think that it's something that people really need to know more during this time. You know, the world is so dreary, it's full of so much darkness, that this celebration sort of combats that and really brings you back to what it means to be human, which is sitting around with friends and family, eating and looking forward to more light coming through. Samira Moyadin co-owns a Persian restaurant in downtown Toronto called Banu,

and she's also the host of the CBC podcast Unforked. We'll be right back with some holiday traditions from the Northwest Territories. You might have heard Adi Yonason on our show last week. She's a board member of the Thay Dene Nene Indigenous Protected Area, and we called her back to ask how she and the Lutsulke Dene First Nation celebrate the season. And I'm just curious, Adi, you're pretty far north. I mean, how much daylight do you get at this time of year, if any? Oh, not much daylight. I think this morning, I didn't check, but I think the sunrise was about after nine.

We try to have activities over the Christmas holidays, you know, we'll start having activities every day on to New Year's Day. We have to, you know, do things here so that, you know, we keep our mental health in a good way. Because, you know, it's dark a lot here. The fire ceremony is to say thank you for all that we have. We feed the fire. We make an offering of tobacco and we always, after a feast, have a plate of food to feed the fire and that's to feed the ancestors. During the holidays, we will have hand games.

So you have two groups of men. Everybody has a token. So if you get caught with a token, then, you know, you're eliminated. And while that's happening, you know, there's drumming going on, which makes it really, you know, lively and really fun to watch. At New Year's, we have the fiddle dance, which has always been part of our tradition here to have a big fiddle dance. For someone who's never seen the fiddle dance,

can you describe it, Addy? What does it sound like and what does the dance look like? We have a band that normally comes in or we have local people that play. We have the guitar, we have the fiddle, and we have square dances. And then there's the jigging. There's the two-stepping.

So all really lively, good music, you know, makes you want to get up and dance. We have maybe about 30 or even 40 people square dancing in the group. You know, people are stomping their feet. They're, you know, clapping, laughing, like just totally enjoying themselves at a fiddle dance. So it's a really good atmosphere to be at. A lot of joy and happiness. Our next tradition comes from Liam Harrop and Christina Disney in Alberta.

They found a way to gamify the holiday spirit. And I think it's probably best if you describe what the Christmas challenge is, Christina, because I do believe it was your idea. It was my idea, although I literally, well, personally designed it for you, so I guess it goes both ways. The Christmas challenges came about in 2015 because Liam and I worked a job together. We worked for a spider diversity company in Northern Alberta and I wanted Liam and I to stay friends. And I was worried that like without working together, we wouldn't hang out anymore. And so when Christmas

came a knocking, I knew Liam's competitive nature might kick in a little bit if I requested a ridiculous challenge. And it was kind of like our version of the 12 days of Christmas. And I think it's sort of varied in and out of how Christmassy it's truly been. But there's always like a few very Christmassy things and then a few just random tasks. So this was, you came up with this as a way for us to stay friends. I did, yes. Oh, well, okay. I actually didn't know that.

The original first year was we each gave each other 12 challenges that had to be completed before midnight of Christmas Eve. And if you did not get challenged done, the consequences have changed over the years, but we've kind of settled on you have to spend the rest of the next year calling the other person your majesty and potentially sending them lovely little gifts from time to time. One of my favorites last year, I don't even remember what the challenge was but we had gotten rain here in edmonton in the winter and i went skating oh i think it was start a new tradition right start a new tradition so skating on the streets which i had like the time of my life like skating down the street like it was so much fun so i really like that because i've always wanted to do that sometimes it is like touch and go like oh do you remember the time we had to go out blindfolded sorry sorry oh that's right one time when we had to like go out blindfolded into we had to spend an entire evening out blindfolded do you think it'll ever end so and that is sort of this is the when i realized how

long we've been doing this for that is the first time that i've had that thought of of how long will this truly go for because i do love the notion of us being 82 and like sneaking around graffitiing something just to be ridiculous. When we did like the knitting graffiti, I wonder if my knitting graffiti is still out. Mine lasted a couple years actually because it was on this thing that I used to drive by and I saw it for quite a while. Even though sometimes I'm like, oh my God, like I have to get how many done before Christmas Eve or things like that, but like it's so much more fun having done it.

Like life is just better if you go the extra mile. Lastly, here's Kathy's story about a very special set of teacups. I own about 10 of these teacups. And one of my favorite ones is completely colored in gold. My name is Kathy Peckin, and I live in London, Ontario. Well, the teacup tradition was begun relatively recently by my daughter, actually. One Christmas morning, I suggested that we have mimosas for Christmas morning using cranberry juice and a little bit of whatever bubbly is around. And she suggested that we have them in the antique tea collection, teacup collection. I own the teacups because they were gifted to me from my mother before she passed away and her mother before her owned them. So they're over several generations. So when she suggested this, it really resonated with both of us because we were celebrating and enjoying the fruits of the women who had made holidays before us in the teacups. Well, it means ongoing

family tradition in the future. I have not yet been blessed with a grandchild. I do have a grand dog, which is exciting, but not quite the same. And so what this gives to me personally is the hope and the sense and the understanding that what's come before my daughter will continue on with her and will go into the future with her. But also not in a way that is fixed or inflexible, in a way that's dynamic. And I think that's how a lot of tradition survives, is it becomes dynamic. It changes with time and circumstance and who might be present and how you choose to share it. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the show and for spending time with us this year. It's been difficult for a lot of people

and there's a lot of tough news stories out there. But I just want to thank you for trusting us to help you understand them. Your support means so much. And thanks also to everyone who shared their traditions for this episode, so we could end the year on a lighter note by sharing them with you. Thanks to Maria, Samira, Addie, Liam, Christina, and Kathy. And a special thanks to Carol White, who found a cassette player so we could share Maddie's Santa Call recording off the top of the show. Next week, we'll be returning to the top news stories of 2022, from economics to politics to music. Hope you can tune in.

I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. On behalf of all of us here at The Decibel,

I hope you have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year, and we'll talk again in January.