Fat Thursday

There are seven continents on the Earth, and each one contains a lot of different countries. In each country lives a unique population. Each continent, each country and each population have their own traditions that no one else from other parts of world can understand. I came from Poland, a country that has a lot of traditions that can be odd and difficult to understand by other people. When I first came to the United States people asked me about Polish Christmas and Eastern traditions, at first it was interesting to answer their questions, but when time was going, that started to be boring because for how long can you talk about the same thing. However, my high school teacher once asked me about my favorite cultural tradition, which of course is Fat Thursday. Unfortunately it has become forgotten in my life like old clothes in wardrobe.

This day is a day when people meet together and celebrate, but here I don’t have a lot of friends and it’s hard to meet with them and have fun. Fat Thursday is a last Thursday before Lent, when you cannot feast or have loud parties, so Fat Thursday is the last opportunity to celebrate and have some fun before days of fast. People meet with friends or relatives and eat large quantities of “pączki”, a kind of donuts with rose marmalade. When I was in Poland, I used to go out with my friends to a neighborhood café called “Brickle” and ate a minimum of ten donuts. Here in United States I don’t have a lot of friends, and if I have they live far away from my house. We cannot just go to some café because there is no café nearby. Also it is hard to find time because a lot of people have to work. A lot of my friends want to adjust to a new culture, so they don’t care about our traditions as much as before. It’s really miserable to see it, especially for me- person who always want to remember and practice customs.

Moreover, I really liked this day because I always helped my mom to cook “faworki”- French dough fingers served with lots of powdered sugar. However, we don’t have the same connection any more. Have you ever smelled a scent of roses mixed with vanilla juice? This delightful smell will always remind me about good moments that I have spent in my home country. When my mother and I cooked, we always talked about everything. I could have always asked her about things that have bothered me. Now, when we are here we don’t have a lot of time to spend together. My mom is working from mornings to evenings, I am going to school and then I am working too, so we lost our opportunity of being together. I have really tried to understand new rules, but sometimes it is depressing that I am losing a bond between my family. I don’t feel the anchored that is holding close my family anymore.

The last part that made The Fat Thursday so special for me was that students never had lessons at this day; here we do. My classmates and I used to play charades where we pantomimed what was in our current topic. When a group won they got donuts, so the prize was very sweet. I thought that games had been a good kind of pastime instead of studying. America is a country with a lot of people from different countries and each of them has their own culture, so it’s kind of hard to celebrate my Polish traditions. In this part I understand why it’s difficult, I always tried to find a good aspect of being in a group of various traditions, one of them can be a new “unique” tradition, for people who come from other parts of world.

There are a lot of traditions in the whole word and there are a lot of traditions that make you belong to part of your culture; however some of them are forgotten. In other word people who live in the United States have hard time to practice them. I think that there are a lot of reasons why they cannot carry them as much as they did before, not only because of their jobs, but also because of the process of adjusting. If you are living in a new country, you try to obey new rules, instead of you should always remember about things that you have learned in your homeland. It’s always good to know what part of culture you represent because if you know who you are, you always feel more comfortable, not like part of nothing.