Reppin our Weird Hometown Traditions

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From Tractor Day to an Italian style wedding to the streets of New York City to throwing water into the air in negative 20 degree weather, we take a tour of some quirky hometown traditions. Does the place you grew up have any unique traditions? We would love to hear from you. Tell us about your hometown’s weird or unique local tradition. Walk us through what goes down—who’s there and what’s happening? Is there an interesting history behind it? What was your relationship to this tradition like when you were growing up—did you partake? What’s your relationship to it now? Did/does it play a role in how you think about the world, or the corner of it you come from? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Or record a voice memo and email it to us at [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	So I grew up in Minnesota where like most places we have some sort of odd local
0:08.5	traditions. One that comes to mind is Lutifisk.
0:13.4	This is a food.
0:14.5	It is a kind of fish jelly, reviled by many,
0:18.8	but also beloved by others.
0:21.5	And it is definitely a kind of Minnesotan slash Scandinavian dish.
0:28.0	Or one of my favorites still is the tradition of when it gets really really cold like negative 20
0:35.1	degrees you take a cup of boiling water outside and you throw it into the air and
0:40.3	it just it becomes a puff of water vapor.
0:44.3	It never hits the ground, it doesn't freeze, it just sublimates into nothing.
0:48.4	It is actually so cool.
0:50.2	Of course, it is a very specific Minnesotan thing because you have to live somewhere where it actually gets to be like negative 20 degrees.
0:57.0	So those are my stories from growing up in Minnesota, but obviously these kinds of local traditions exist everywhere and today our
1:05.5	colleagues are going to share some of their stories but where they grew up like
1:11.0	Nicki who brought an Italian style wedding to the streets of New York, or
1:15.0	Chrissy who has a particular childhood story to share, or Zach who tells us about
1:21.0	his hometown that is inspired by the mythological bird, the Phoenix,
1:25.6	and it is not in fact Phoenix, Arizona, somewhere else.
1:29.4	I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.
1:36.0	More after this. The Hi, I'm Mickey, and I'm on the Trips team at Alice Obscura.
1:59.0	When I was getting married, I really wanted to incorporate traditions. I'm half
2:04.5	Sicilian Puerto Rican my spouse is Puerto Rican and so we looked at a lot of like
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