The Science of Celebration - Lab 035

Hey, y'all. Before today's new lab kicks off, we've got a little treat, an oldie, but a total goodie on the art and sociology of celebration. Whether you're gearing up for the Fourth of July fireworks, a backyard family reunion, or even just celebrating the miracle of being alive this summer, this one's for you. Stick around, because sometimes the best sparks come from labs. We've already lit I'm Tt and

We love celebrating.

We like celebrating everything from big things to small things. Yes, in this episode, we are talking all about celebration and the sociology behind it.

I think it's important to really acknowledge celebrations exist across cultures. They may look different, but almost every culture has some type of celebratory time or season or event. And there are some cultural universals, so behaviors that or values that show up in different cultures. They might not necessarily be the same, but we see them all the time. So dancing or food, or rituals or different religious practices, those are cultural universals, and they're all often elements of various

So with that being said, let's jump into the recitation.

What do we know?

TT, Well, we know right now there are a lot of people that are celebrating, including us.

Yes, and we also know there seems to be this gravitational pool to celebration being outside, loud and with snacks and drinks.

Yes, we need libations.

And I think, you know, I just want to understand what's driving us to celebrate. I think I want to know why it's food always something that folks want to bring out when.

It's time to celebrate. Is that something that's just like is it a cultural thing?

Is it all cultures and even beyond just us celebrating? This feels like some spontaneous celebration in the fall. There's that season of celebration right after spooky season where if people celebrate Thanksgiving around that time, heading into all of the winter high holidays, I feel like I can almost smell it in.

The air, you know.

But if I didn't grow up celebrating these holidays, would I still feel that same way?

Right?

Maybe it's a part of our subconscious mind to feel like we're supposed to be celebrating right now.

And then I want to know.

Friendsgiving is a new thing, but I don't know whose idea. Yeah, this was, it's a genius idea, but I want to know whose idea it was and when it got started.

I think friendsgiving is the perfect example as we start to think about celebration on a whole right because you don't have to believe any one certain thing to participate in friendsgiving. It also feels like it's a little more low stakes than some of the other holidays, so you don't have to jump in and sprinkle cinnamon all over your house.

If you want to participate in friendsgiving.

Friendsgiving feels more like a come as you are celebration rather than you got to get dressed up with your auntie and uncle and answer all their annoying questions.

I don't want to wear a sequin top. So I think we're ready to move into the dissection and understand more about celebration. So this dissection is a little bit different. The guest expert today, Well, it's us welcome.

I think we're.

Professional celebrators and I think it's a great time for us to just hold that mirror up and explore some of our own behavior around holidays.

We're talking all about celebrations, and I think a great place to start would be talking about a celebration kind of like Friendsgiving, where it is a new form of celebration and I think a lot of people are starting to do it.

So let's start with the history of Friendsgiving. It's basically a spin on Thanksgiving. And when we look back at Thanksgiving is basically a big feast. And so your want for a meat lover's pizza, my want for mimosa. That's gathering around food, and that's not new. Almost all cultures

M okay.

And so it's best to have a feast, which is like a large meal, and it's usually outrageous amounts of food compared to what you would normally have day to day. It's gonna be pretty hard to do that if you don't have a season of harvest, if you don't have a lot of stuff to choose from.

And you know what I like is that when you look up the definition of feast, it's a verb and it means to eat and drink sumptuously.

I like that word sumptuously. I'm just started using that.

So when we start to think about friends Giving, this is kind of new. Like you said, it's been on the rise. If you look at Google trends and they show you know, that little graph of how often different terms are searched, it doesn't make its first kind of big blip until like twenty ten, and then you just see every year around November it just peaks up. And so it's been on the rise since like the twenty ten. If you think about two thousand and seven to twenty ten,

So I remember being an undergrad and before we would go home for Thanksgiving break, me and my friends one year got together and had like a little Thanksgiving because we were like, oh, you know, we're thankful for each other. We should all get together and do something. So I think it also was something where folks wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving with their friends before having to go home and celebrate with their families.

And that makes me think also there is something that we kind of borrow from LGBTQ culture, which is your chosen family. Yeah, these people you choose and who have chosen you in return. So even if you don't have great relationships with your blood relatives, right, you have this family who you are super grateful for and you want to celebrate with them, so you create this occasion to

A turkey costs?

Turkeys are expensive. I will never purchase a turkey. Write that in Stone. I will never purchase a turkey.

So when you consider those things and then these other kind of emotional pools where you want to acknowledge these people who have supported you year round and who have helped you grow m you kind of have these converging factors that drive this new holiday.

We're redefining family.

We are, and we're also dignifying friendship.

Absolutely.

We talked about that in the What About Your Friend's episode, like we need to be giving our friendships way more weight than we give them, Like, our friends are so important to our lives, and.

I think if you understand that, then you got to have a celebration. Yet, this is the bet Awards of friendship. Okay, the Emmys of friendship, the Grammys of friendship, that's.

What friends giving it is.

I need to find a dress, roll.

Out the red carpet for the people you love. So, as we mentioned before, we're looking at celebration through the life of sociology.

Sociology is the study of society, and that's the big umbrella. So that can be the development the structure of a society or how it functions, and you can also talk about like social relationships and institutions.

So when we're talking.

About the sociology of celebration, we're talking about how we behave cross culturally when a celebration occurs, whether it's planned or spontaneous.

When we try to figure out some clues to help us characterize why we behave like this, why we enjoy celebration, and sometimes while we celebrate too much. We came across the Journal of Comparative Research and Anthropology and Sociology. They had a whole issue on celebration and these two authors, Rusu and Cantola laid out this great kind of way to navigate through celebration. If you think about celebration as a map. On most maps, you have a north, south, east, and west.

Those are four coordinates. They give us three.

Coordinates temporality, spatiality, and sociality.

Okay, so let's get into it.

So let's talk about temporality. And this is all about time. So when we think about time as it relates to celebration celebrations are these disruptions in our day to day. I can remember as a kid somebody's birthday party happening on a Saturday.

That was an anomaly, right, Yeah, we were gonna eat cake, we were gonna do all these things that we did not normally do on Saturday.

Chuckie Cheese had the best pizza.

Pizza is your celebration food.

It really is, and it probably started with chuck E Cheese.

But you almost find that when we think about these celebrations that are rooted in time, so religious holidays, they almost pattern our day to day. So if you think about our year going along in a circle, every time we hit March or April, there are some spring celebrations. Every time around the summer, there's Juneteenth or fourth of July,

Every year at the same time.

Right, And so it's interesting we can think of these celebrations that's helping us shift from the monotony of this day to day kind of punch in, punch out clock in clock out. They add some excitement to our day to day lives.

And it gives us something to look forward to.

Right, Yes.

And it feels a little crazy, right because you're saying, oh, we pattern time with these celebrations and they disrupt time. So if they disrupt time at the same time all the time, aren't they a pattern too.

It's too much for my brain. It's like if we're going into exception.

Right.

I saw something else that was really interesting, and it talked about these two Greek words related to Greek mythology about time, So there was kronos and chiros. You can think of chronos as representing the godly personification is what this text says of linear, never ending quantitative time. So for me, chronos is the clock and we can think of chronological order right, linear.

Time, right, But kiros is a little bit different. Chiros is like I'm just going off the vibes, right, And for me, that is what celebration time is, like, you know, the vibe when we're celebrating, Just show up when it's time. Do you remember that time we had a party and our friend Sean said she was gonna bring hamburger buns and she showed up so late.

Oh my gosh. And she showed up late.

I was like, okay, well, you're bringing a critical element because we're grilling out and we have burgers and hot dogs, and you were in charge of the vehicle buns for those meets.

Sewn showing up when she felt like it was time to show up for me, that's Chiros, right, it's no.

Real What is an hour? What is time? When the party starts?

And I am a firm proponent of Kiro's when it comes to when a celebration ends. The party is over when we're dead.

So the next element of the coordinates of celebration is spatiality, and that's all about where's the party at. Along with our routinized celebrations, this usually happens at a certain place. Right, So if you're celebrating passover, maybe you go to a satyr at your grandmother's house every year, or maybe if you're celebrating ed, you go to your uncle's house every year,

What about u Z.

I think for major holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, when we celebrated those growing up, we always went to my grandma's house, so my mom's mom the drive down there, I remember.

It will be like so excited to go there.

It was like an hour or so away from where we lived in Greensboro, and it was just a thing, right, you were just bubbling with excitement.

Now we went there every other weekend. That wasn't a holiday, but it just hit different right now.

It would have been like homecoming season.

I can remember A and T Homecoming all right, geho, greatest homecoming on Earth. I didn't even go to A and T, but I grew up in the city where it was, so I felt like A and T's homecoming was always like another big holiday. People would come because a lot of my family members went there, so you would see family. It was like a mini Thanksgiving before Thanksgiving, and we would go to my great aunt, my aunt Lina,

Yeah, so I guess we can zoom out a little bit. So it's like not even just specific for your family, but even like culturally as Americans, like when we think about celebrating New Year's Eve, we think of the ball dropping in Times Square. We might not necessarily be there, but it's just so iconic and ingrain into our minds that we think of that.

When we think of New Year's.

Eve, the spatiality aspect is really interesting because it can be a whole city, you know, like when we think about Mardi Gras in New Orleans and when we think about Running of the Bulls there are these places where these celebrations occur. And it can be broad like that, but it can also be really specific. So, right, if you normally eating your kitchen or your living room, but for big holidays, you guys all gather around a dining table and you use that special furniture.

Hah, the special plates, Yeah, the napkins.

That's a spatial queue, right, is almost reminiscent of some religious ceremonies and celebrations that happen in these sacred spaces or sanctuaries, right, And we're almost replicating that. There's something ritualistic about a lot of our celebrations anyway, and so here we see it appearing again.

Yeah, and then.

Even if there isn't a special place for whatever you're trying to celebrate, we convert our existing spaces into a space for celebration. Absolutely, and that is literally what folks did for Friendsgiving. So we've touched temporality, which is time space, reality which is where are you? And now we're hitting sociality, which is how does it feel. It's the social aspect.

So the togetherness you're kind of dropping those barriers is the vibes. It's really interesting because when you have a holiday. You got your core group of people that you always normally see, but then you always have some stragglers. You got that one cousin who shows up for Easter, you like, we haven't seen them all year, right, Or you have that aunt or uncle that you don't really deal with like that, but you're gonna keep it cute for the holiday, right.

Mm hmmm hmm.

It almost feels like community level or group level, we're all extending a little bit more grace.

Yes, worldwide vibes and no one is supposed to be coming in and killing the vibe, and so sociality I.

Think is key to a good celebration.

But I think it's important to highlight sociality can go either way because that sense of community. You can either leverage it and make everybody feel equal, you can bring everybody in. And it really depends on your holiday because if you have a holiday that is built on power dynamics and access to certain things, it can also isolate too. So you want to be aware of that when you building your friends giving. Are you saying everybody got to bring a ball of asa space? Everybody can't do that.

I won't be there.

And some folks don't drink right, and so those are all the things to think about.

You know.

I had to really question my cookout style. Over the past couple of years, I've had more and more vegetarian friends. Oh, and I said, what do you have to offer them? Is it a celebration if they can only have a potato it's not.

Oh my goodness.

Yes, this happened to me because me and Jimmy do a holiday like dinner every year, and two dinners ago, so not the last one we did, but the one before that. We had some friends that showed up and I knew that they were vegetarians, and we tried to have some vegetarian options, but one was vegan and that just eliminated all options. There was literally nothing for them to eat. And I was mortified. I was messing up the sociality of my dinner party. I was killing the

But we're not going to talk about it just yet. We're about to take a break, and when we come back, we'll jump right into the case for scaling back on celebrations. I know, seems a little counterintuitive, and how we'll continue to celebrate even when we can't be together.

We're back, and now we're going to jump into the case for scaling back on celebrations. We have already talked in great detail about how we love to celebrate, but in some cases, some you kind of have to just fall back a little bit and chill.

I think we have to make some points really clear. When we say we like to celebrate, we don't mean every time we have to take things to the top. I mean we like to find the celebratory moments even in the small things. Right, So it's like, hmm, this doctor Pepper has all the fizz. It's a parday, you know.

It's all the little.

Things, the little stuff when it happens things go the way you want, or even when things, don't. That's the time to really celebrate that we're just here and making it okay.

Yes, I remember one time when we were in grad school and I baked a batch of cookies and I took some to the kid's lab and she loved it.

It was a celebration really for nothing.

I love that kind of stuff, you know.

I think we just need more moments of joy for ourselves, right, because if we are relying on it externally, the external world will fail.

You.

We see that we had all the twenty twenty and look at what he did. I'm so ashamed of twenty twenty. I don't even want to talk about it.

Right, you got to celebrate life while you still got it.

That's right.

But I think some people take it to the extreme on the other part. Right, it's not a party unless there are custom name cards for everybody, streamers hanging down, a minor explosion of viral techniques, and I'm just like, no, no, no, we don't need that for a birthday, for the first birthday, you know, you know, they won't even remember.

This, right exactly.

I think we've seen even this year some issues with some celebrations that went a little bit over the top, like the gender reveals that started wildfires in California and Arizona.

Yeah, you want us.

To know what genitalia your child has, and then you're gonna burn down half the state.

I think that's a little excessive, right, it is?

It is.

I think there's also a whole culture around celebrations. Some of this feels like I look at Pinterest, I say, Pinterest, you're giving people way too many ideas. My friend, her cousin was having a baby and she made a whole cake out of diapers. She was like, I have to find the right lace to tie around these diapers. I have to find the right ribbon and trimming. It was a Safari style thing, and she needed to find all

But it was a labor of love for her.

I remember this.

But I think social media is also a driver because honey, people start posting yes, doing it for the gram.

I'm just trying to do it for me.

So another reason why people might be celebrating a lot could be because of this whole idea of globalization. A lot of people are starting to live farther and farther apart from each other. Because of the way technology is, we have the ability to stay in contact with people literally all over the world. Yes, the cultures are blending, so we have a lot more multicultural families, and social media is at.

The wheel of this bus.

We are over celebrating and oversharing and doing all of the extra things.

And so it's going to be really interesting to see how this season of celebration plays out. With first everybody sharing on social media, with second, everybody supposed to be quarantining up until now.

Right, y'all supposed to be social distancing.

I'm interested to see how all these factors come together during this season of celebration.

It's a unique time.

And let me tell you something, baby, I'm zooming. Okay, I'm zooming with y'all, And don't zoom by my house, especially not unannounced.

Yes, we are talking about the web conferencing software. Do not zoom here.

I'm all about togetherness, but let's be together.

Virtually be together apart.

This year, I'm gonna do a friends giving with a few people who have been in their homes NonStop and who are just as diligent about coronavirus safety protocols as I am, and then I'm zooming with everybody else they can also have the same thing we're having here. I'm gonna be sharing my recipes.

Yes, all of it, and I will be eating yes. So that's all I bring to the table. This is the reason why I've been so diligent over the last however many months. We've been social distancing because I knew this time would come. I knew that folks would mess us up, for all of us, and we would not be doing the normal fall time celebrations, and that friends giving would be affected. And I knew that my friend would still be cooking, and I know me, I want that food.

So I said sacrifice now so you can enjoy the spoils later.

You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs. Podcast tt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Sakiya at z said so.

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