Positive customs that are no longer practiced

As I was having my morning coffee I began thinking about practices that were common when I was a child but do not seem to be done anymore.  The practice that got me thinking in this direction was that of bringing food to the family of a person who had died.  I am not talking about a few cookies.  When my dad died when I was 11 there were so many boxes of food arriving at our house we had trouble figuring out where to put them.

This was not just us. This seemed to be common practice in southern Illinois in the late 50s and early 60s.

What other practices have been dropped from our culture?

I think it depends on the culture.  I am part of one community that still does get together to bring food to households undergoing a major upheaval - death or birth, illness & Disability etc.  And I am aware of at least two other, different communities where this is still common too.

But neither are my _geographical_ community and culture, despite having some good relationships with some good neighbours.  

But there are lots of people trying to rebuild this kind of geographical community, in the "mainstream" as it were.  

I volunteer with our local Black-led church Mutual Aid.  We deliver 7 home cooked meals a week not just to people in need in the congregation - I'm not part of the church! - but to many others who ask. Funding comes from a patchwork of sources. It's not self-sustaining yet, however - it relies on a few committed, ageing & Disabled individuals.

When my mother in law past away in 2003, the ladies in her class at church furnished our family with several casserole type dishes.

The one I remember was the Breakfast Casserole because I had never had one.  

We were left with the task of returning the casserole dishes, though.

I actually feel this is still done through church membership.

The custom that to me has changes the most is small weddings.  No one has those anymore.

Another related custom was that a previously divorced bride did not wear white, instead the bride wore a cream colored or off white gown. Now everyone wear white.

Chain letters were popular before the email craze.  I got a lot of recipes that way.

They still go the food thing around here too but not as much as back then, I don't think.

I miss when you just got in the car and drove on over to a friend's or relative's house without an appointment. If they weren't home, you just snooped around the place a little to see what might be different, visited with the dogs or horses a bit and left what you probably brought with you on the porch, or you just got back in the car and went for a ride, or fishing.

Hi Mark,

Yes.  There are still pockets where this is common…but overall it is rare.   To take this to a greater extreme, I made a 60 mile round trip for general shopping and to get a post for my mailbox.   When I returned, my mailbox was sitting there with a new post. I never did figure out which neighbor replaced it.

An old fashioned custom amongst Chinese people was that we never visited anyone’s home without bringing a small gift, usually food - fruit, home baking, preserves etc.

My nephews who are both in their early 20’s will always bring a gift when they come to visit, usually food or drink, even if it’s just a bar of good chocolate, wine or assorted cheeses.

As children, we were taught to always greet elders when we met them, even in our own home. It was the height of bad manners to not verbally greet a person when they entered a room.

Even if they weren’t related, we always called elders by a title - aunty, uncle, grandma, grandpa.

It irritates me no end when I go into a store and the assistants don’t acknowledge our presence. Perhaps it bothers me more than others due to my cultural upbringing.

Here's a small, simple one -- giving a wave when someone courteously makes room so you can merge into another lane.

Someone was aware and awake, and made an effort to help you -- you acknowledge this with a friendly wave, a salute. And when you do this, the person who gets a wave will be inclined to continue extending courtesy to other people.

Megan Palmer wrote:My nephews who are both in their early 20’s will always bring a gift when they come to visit, usually food or drink, even if it’s just a bar of good chocolate, wine or assorted cheeses.

That is definitely a thing here still. Also not accepting hospitality (or not offering it) is considered unfriendly.

It irritates me no end when I go into a store and the assistants don’t acknowledge our presence.

It is recommended good practise for shop assistants to greet customers entering a store - mostly to deter shoplifting. I always try to do it in my shop, and go and check whether they need assistance after a few minutes.

John, that’s interesting that you mention specific example.  Many years ago, the couple who owned the house across from us unexpectedly had the wife check in to the hospital for what appeared to be a minor reason and three days later she was dead.  Her husband was, as you might imagine, struck with grief.  

My wife, being who she is, made up a whole container (a great big disposable aluminum dish) full of some food (I can’t remember what it was specifically, but chicken dumplings sounds like something that she would have done).  There were days, perhaps a week of meals in that container.  We headed over just to make certain that he got it personally (didn’t want to let it just sit!) and let him know that if he needed anything, just ask.

I don’t know if this is generational, she and I are Gen X, but it definitely is the sort of thing that she just does out of the kindness of her heart.


Eric

It has occurred to me that there are some new positive customs we're trying to develop in my communities that we didn't used to need or weren't possible.

For example (especially if you're both using mobile phones), communicate in text form (email, SMS etc.) if practical, to arrange an mutually convenient time to talk on the phone, rather than just ringing 'out of the blue'.

Also, to cope with households having more cars then there are parking spaces, all the near neighbours talking to one another if there's a family gathering planned: has anyone got a spare parking space that day, ask for permission to borrow them & share the descriptions of the visitors cars, so no one accidentally gets their car blocked in or out.

Sort of a lost custom but from a much older time... donating time to help neighbors.

I was thinking about how modern life allows us to be so independent from each other that we have no need to interact with our neighbors. In times past, your neighbors would help roof your house, or clean your stable when you had a new baby, or build your barn with you.

It occurred to me that this wasn't just being generous to each other. Of course, you needed the whole village to build roofs and barns back then, but it also built community ties. In my readings about traditional tribal communities what stood out to me was the extent to which tribal existence was held together not by law but by *reciprocal obligation*. It was the debt you owed to people helping you out which bound you as an individual to the tribe, and which made you help out in turn. Over a lifetime these repeated debts tied everyone together and made sure everyone was acquainted with each other's strengths. People would avoid breaking laws not because there were police but because it would cause trouble for the whole group you were part of. A person who caused trouble, caused it for their whole extended group, so people would avoid causing trouble to avoid inconveniencing their extended kin, the people they owed a lot to and didnt want to disappoint.

In short, I think our modern independence is simultaneously the destruction of our community bonds. We don't need each other, and that makes us not know each other, and that makes a neighborhood group weak, barely less than strangers.  We don't get to know our neighbors because we don't have to.

So if we want to build real community, we have to get back to doing things for our neighbors, *even if we don't need to* because doing things for each other is where community comes from. A tradition of helping each other out with some project each year might do that.

In my last village, while I was nursing my old uncle and living actually IN the village not on our little farm on the outskirts, I encountered a few local customs that were truly awesome.

One was the way they all treated my son, who was nine years old when we moved there. Most of the people in the village were elderly and would occasionally need a bit of help with something. If ever that help was the sort of thing that my son might be capable of doing, they would flag him down when the saw him outside and ask him to come and help. Maybe it was to climb a tree to pick figs, or crawl somewhere awkward to fetch something that had escaped, or run an errand, or see if he could figure out why their lights weren't working, or to read a letter that had arrived (many of the older folks at that time were illiterate), that sort of thing. And then they would shower him with gifts - a bowl of figs, a cake, a rice-pudding they'd made for him, an ice-cream if the mobile freezer shop was due that day. The end result of this was a young boy who grew up totally devoted to everyone in the village and eager to jump in and help anyone with anything.

Another thing was the bag of clothes. This was a custom shared with the neighbouring village as ours was rather small. There was a bag full of unwanted clothing that was passed around pretty much everybody. You took anything you could use, and put in anything you had that you no longer needed, then the bag was passed along to someone else.

When fruit was ripe, especially if it was something like figs where different varieties ripen at different times, they would fill up bowls and loudly bang on your door to summon you and present you with the bowl of fruit. You would take the bowl, remove the fruit, and immediately return the bowl so they weren't left without it - such commodities are precious. So if there was a loud banging on the door, you knew that gifts were arriving!. If, however, there was a very gentle tapping on the door, you would generally find an embarrassed neighbour in desperate need of help, awkwardly shuffilng and trying to explain what they needed. Usually something like their tractor had got stuck and they needed another one to pull it out, or they'd got locked out and needed someone to break into the house and let them in again - my son got very good at making a tool to let them in quickly and easily and the neighbours never realised why I was so mortified when they told everyone how good my son was and how he could break in in under a minute... And of course the time when one of them accidentally set fire to her backyard and we spent hours helping her put it out because she knew that if her son found out she'd done it she'd end up being bundled up and taken to live with him in Lisbon where he could keep an eye on her. My son got a whole box of ice-creams for that, and a 20 euro note!

I think such things are the origin of the saying about how it takes a village to raise a child...

Burra Maluca wrote:Another thing was the bag of clothes. This was a custom shared with the neighbouring village as ours was rather small. There was a bag full of unwanted clothing that was passed around pretty much everybody. You took anything you could use, and put in anything you had that you no longer needed, then the bag was passed along to someone else.

This is a great idea! I wonder what else could be adapted to pass round like that?

My grandparents spoke of a time when people spent the evenings on their front porches, especially in summer when the outside temperatures dropped lower than inside.  This allowed for casual socialization with neighbors.  This went away when AC and television entered every home.

Due to our rural home place, it seems like most social activities require prior planning and a drive. I think back fondly on times in my life when spontaneous socialization was commonplace.

In my rural part of North Carolina, (USA) we still bring food to anyone who lost a loved one or has a major unexpected hospitalization. Our church has a lady who has taken it on herself to coordinate those meals amongst the community folks, and when a need arises, she calls and asks if there is a day we could help out so that they don't get more food at once than they can handle.

One of my favorite customs of days gone by that is somewhat still around, but much less common place than it should be is taking extra veggies and fruits grown to the elderly or shut ins in the community.

One of my favorite Paul Harvey quotes:
"At the end of a dirt road, the only time we even locked our car was in August, because if we didn't, some neighbor would fill it with too much Zucchini."

"It takes a village to raise a child" is apparently documented as originating from Igbo communities: "Oran a azu nwa", with similar concepts in other cultures.

https://www.infosys.com/about/diversity-inclusion/racial-equity-inclusion.html

I don't know when I stopped, opening the car door for my wife.

Robert Ray wrote:I don't know when I stopped, opening the car door for my wife.

Never too soon to start back. People look at me like i'm crazy sometimes for it, but I know it would hurt my wife's feelings just a little bit if I quit, even if she would never say so or admit it.

Oh man, porch visiting in the evening after dinner was the best when I was a kid, we'd all show up at the neighbours' house 2 houses down from my house, and it was lovely, I learnt a lot as a young kid watching the adults and interacting with them.  I knew I'd be one someday so I wanted to know how it was done.

I'm really enjoying seeing how some customs still persist and can be reimplemented. Because for every person who says 'hey nobody does X anymore' someone else will see someone doing X that very day. I think a lot of these maybe aren't as far gone as we think.

I was raised by two people from non-functional families, so I didn't learn a lot of the 'normal' cultural stuff and quite frankly am not sure what was normal. But starting when I went off to boarding school I learned what other people did, and it was a buffet of things for me to adopt as I moved from place to place, and those became our customs-- what my daughter does now, for example. One of those is to never arrive at someone's house without a gift, another is to send food to a family where someone's just died, leave a bag of garden produce on my neighbor's gate, things like that. Anything that's not common here is explained by the fact that I'm not from around here (and I've also passed the age of caring what others think of me).
It's kind of like Permaculture-- you never know who you're going to influence with your actions.

Ok, here is another one that I do.  I simply can't not open a door for a woman if she is near and I can do it without much effort.  Its something that my father taught me long ago (I think--oddly I can't remember the exact time when I learned it, I just sort of always knew it.).  It just seems courteous.  And its not like I won't do so for a man if he is carrying a bunch of stuff and has his hands full.

But I am deeply conditioned to always open the door for a woman if I can.

I have some people tell me that this is sexist and that I am perpetuating gender roles.  Maybe I am perpetuating gender roles, but its a pretty harmless one.  And again, it just seems courteous.



Eric

John F Dean wrote: To take this to a greater extreme, I made a 60 mile round trip for general shopping and to get a post for my mailbox.   When I returned, my mailbox was sitting there with a new post. I never did figure out which neighbor replaced it.

The post might have been replace by USPS as they generally furnish the post if you furnish the mail box.

Just check with your local post office.

Hi Anne,

That was the first place I checked.  The PO wasn’t involved.

Hi Eric,  at 76 I am pretty healthy, and I can toss around 50 pound bags of feed for most of the day.  Nevertheless, when I am at the feed store and someone offers to help me load my truck, I am more than happy to accept their help.  

Eric Hanson wrote:always open the door

something that I always think of as a woman when someone opens a door for me.... one of the few things I did learn from my parents, along with calling everyone sir/maam (woot army family)...

If someone's coming up behind you and your hand is on the door, it's only right to hold that door OPEN, be they man/woman/butcher/baker/candlestick maker.*
It can lead to funny moments when the man behind me really wants to hold the door open for me. I prefer to laugh at the improbable situation that two humans want to outdo each other with niceness!


*Maybe DO let it slam if it's a raccoon, alligator or zombie.

Tereza,

I like that--out do each other with a simple act of kindness.

Last spring I mentioned in my AP Psychology class about opening the door for women as something that I just have to do.  Sadly, not one student seemed to even know what I was talking about--The only guy there (he seemed to be a respectable, somewhat old-fashioned kid) just told me that not only did he not do this, but he didn't even know what I was talking about as a sort of intuitive action.  

A little sad.



Eric

John,

You might have a couple of decades on me, but I won't turn down the offer to help load something if the offer is given either.


Eric

Most people don't bother to respond o invitations in a timely manner, or bail at the last minute. They don't bother to thank you after your entertaining them.

Eric Hanson wrote:Ok, here is another one that I do.  I simply can't not open a door for a woman if she is near and I can do it without much effort.  

I am female, I open and hold doors for anyone I can. If I'm holding it for a group and a guy in the group wants to take over door service, I'm happy to let him. I think holding doors is just good manners for anyone.


On another note, I also tend to call people of any age "Sir" or "Ma'am" or assorted variants of that sort of thing.  It's partly habit because I was taught to do it with adults as a kid, part because I feel it's respectful, and part because I'm bad with names.  :D  I can pull off "Hello sir! It's good to see you again!" when I just can't come up with his name.

"Young miss" or "young sir" is common for me, as are variants like "Madam Cashier" and "Mister Car Parts Man."

If an 8 year old boy does something nice for me, I'll say "Thank you so much Sir!" and his reaction is always to stand up straighter and look proud of himself.  

I had a 15 year old girl working for me for a while who was stunned the first time I called her Miss, I don't think (knowing now what I do I about her family) that she had ever been treated as anything other than an unruly and useless child, and the positive effect my calling her variants of Miss had on her was obvious. I don't believe she had ever felt worthy of any respect at all in her life. Being asked a question by her boss prefaced with "Excuse me Miss Wonderful Lady" absolutely floored her.

I think it would be great to see more people being using polite wording, even if you are not as odd personality-wise as I am, find a way that works for you.  Not everyone's style can casually pull off "Excuse me, Miss Awesome Stuff, where DID you hide the framing hammer!?"  :D

I, too, was taught that holding doors was good manners for anyone. Especially to hold doors for the elderly.

Something that isn’t done as much anymore but is very positive is stopping to knock on friends’ doors and see if they are home. One person recently encouraged me to do so, and while I haven’t stopped by their door yet, I did stop to knock on the door of a friend on the way back from gathering mushrooms yesterday and it turned out to be a welcome visit. They were having issues I hadn’t yet heard about and were happy to have some company.

Borrowing tools from neighbors seems like one that's fading too. There used to be less expectation that every house needed its own copy of every tool.
You knew who had the post hole digger, who had the trailer, who had the good ladder, and sooner or later they borrowed something from you. Probably saved everybody money and gave people a reason to actually know each other.

Please and Thank-You and You're Welcome. A simple one, but profound:

Fewer and fewer people seem to be saying "Thank You" these days. Worse, even fewer (if any) respond with, "You're welcome."
Instead we increasingly hear "No problem".

This is a more telling issue than we realize. "You're welcome" means "I am happy to do this for you." It implies a service, a gift, willingly rendered in an active social exchange. "No problem" actually reverses the interaction. The act of service disappears, and the receiver is instead pardoned for interrupting a server who apparently has better things they could be doing.

This is a major generational shift in the understanding of service within the community, especially in the commercial setting, where customers and employees are no longer considered assets to a company, but problems that need to be managed. Workers aren't paid to positively interact with customers anymore. Instead, they are paid to manage issues presented by an increasingly entitled and disgruntled public. The job is a necessary inconvenience for them and the employer, and whatever service is provided is done so at a personal cost, one which the customer should apologize for demanding.

For this reason, I always try to make sincere eye contact when I say "Thank You", and I always respond to someone else's Thank You with a good-natured "You're Welcome."