Culture shock
2008-01-05 | Filed under Daleks, Dancing, Knitting, Life |
In the past week, I experienced two sharp moments of culture shock.
The first occurred at a wedding. Each place setting had a Christmas cracker. Before we were seated, the DJ wove through the crowd, informing everyone of the timing for pulling open the crackers (when the bride and groom were announced), the request that we all wear the paper crowns (duh)—and, shockingly, a basic explanation of Christmas crackers.
It may bear mentioning that in recent generations my relatives who did not come from North Wales came from Liverpool, so I undoubtedly had a more Anglo-centric upbringing than most. I absorbed Doctor Who years before Star Trek, and my impressions of the veterinary profession were formed watching All Creatures Great and Small. When I was a kid, we’d take an early winter day trip to Ontario for shopping. Along with other UK themed yummies, we’d buy Christmas crackers for dinner on Christmas Eve.
So I expressed my shock to Larry; while he is better acquainted with Christmas crackers than your average Jew, he didn’t have any difficulty understanding how some people might not have encountered them. And indeed, an informal survey of a few guests (and random folks in the past several days) confirms that intelligent and generally well-informed adults can be ignorant of this particular cultural artifact.
The second shocking thing occurred when I brought my knitting to the Hogmanay recovery party. Several people asked what I was knitting, and I simply said “A Dalek” and showed them the picture on my printout of the pattern. A subset of those people asked if it was going to be a tea cozy.
Even my public knitting tends to take place in informal settings, and I am used to people recognizing a Dalek. This isn’t so much the Anglo-centrism as geek-centrism. I am always a bit surprised to find such glaringly imperfect overlap of geekdoms.
Though I will admit, in the picture the stuffed Daleks do kind of look like tea cozies.
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I got a cat stamp/BDP a whistle/WTP a teeny snowman with an even teenier suction cup…and the usual awful jokes! Missed you both as the crackers popped.(Nelson, not having an opposable thumb, got nothing.)