Yesterday was St. Lucia Day, a Swedish holiday that celebrates the life of a saint who dedicated her life to feeding and caring for the poor until she was brutally executed for being a Christian. She's also the patron saint of the blind because she was blinded before her execution. There's a lot more to the story, but that's not what I want to get into on here. You can read more on wikipedia for that story. It's been a tradition in my family to attend the St Lucia Festival every year and sing along with the traditional Swedish Yuletide songs, and for me, to get dressed up in the white robe and sing with the other kids while I was growing up. I try to attend a St Lucia festival wherever I live. There was a nice one in Chicago at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Andersonville, but I couldn't find one in Oxford, and there is definitely not on in Bloomington (the closest is a 4-5 hour drive away at the very northern tip of Indiana).
So this year I opted to watch the official Swedish Santa Lucia program on the internet. It doesn't quite have the charm of being there in person with the candlelight and glögg afterparty, but it's something.
What struck me this year as we are in Indiana, far from our families and from our ancestral homelands was that I could still in some small way be connected to my family. I imagined how different it would have been for my relatives who first came to the US in the early 1900s, not knowing if they would ever make it back to their homeland. I think part of what kept them going was being able to hold on to traditions. To this day, displaced Swedes (and I am sure other ethnic groups) continue with traditions that may have long been abandoned by the people in their homeland. Traditions are what makes any place feel like home, even when you are thousands of miles away.
In Sociology, there's a whole area dedicated to globalization, which is sort of the melting pot idea but on a global scale, and the concept of the diaspora. A diaspora is a group of people who have left their homeland all at once, but who have all relocated to a new country and live near each other (think of a Chinatown or Little Italy). They may or may not have known each other in the homeland, but they come together in the new country to celebrate their cultural festivals and create a sense of community. Eventually, but not always, the immigrants assimilate into the local community and the diaspora disperses as people move out of the neighborhood and/or intermarry with people from other backgrounds.
Sometimes these cultural festivals in immigrant neighborhoods go on long after the original group of immigrants leave the neighborhood. For example, in the Cicero neighborhood of Chicago, there is a Houby (Mushroom) Festival that was started by the Czech diaspora. The neighborhood is now primarily Mexican, yet the Czech mushroom parade continues, with Czechs coming in from elsewhere.
When my family moved to the US, they were in a Swedish diaspora. It may not have been as dense as some of the other ethnic neighborhoods, but there were enough Swedes to support their own church in downtown Providence. Like other immigrant groups without their extended families around, they came together at certain times of the year to have that sense of groundedness and community with people who shared a similar background. The St Lucia festival is one of those special events, made even more special because there are no gifts exchanged and no big feast to prepare. It's just some beautiful singing by candlelight followed by some light refreshments and spending time with people who have something in common.
So I take this special day wherever I live to remember my heritage and feel a sense of connectedness to the generations that came before me. Even though I live far from family and really far from my ancestral homeland, there is something nice about feeling connected, even if it is only through the internet.
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