Cultural norms

I have a really interesting story regarding cultural norms that I would like to share with you.

My uncle lives overseas and one Christmas he brought his family across the pond to celebrate the holidays with the extended family. Now it's important to note that my uncle is married to an absolutely beautiful and wonderful Muslim woman, whom I love dearly. But she comes from a different culture, different social class and has had an extremely different upbringing than our family. To start off, she's Muslim, we're not. She comes from a wealthy family and has 12 brothers and sisters and is used to having servants, as is customary for her culture.

So there you go, the stage is set for a beautifully white Christmas in Canada.

As is common to Canadian Christmas, it was cold, dark and snowy and this was the first time that my uncles family (from Southeast Asia) and his entourage of servants and children would see snow. It was also the first time that they would celebrate Christmas.

So my uncle shows up and my mother, remembering that his favorite meal is ham, cooks one without second thought. My uncle, who is delighted to have pork for the first time in probably around a decade, also fails to think anything of the cooked pig in the house.What they both failed to remember is that Muslim's don't eat pork. All is wonderful until my Aunt sees the ham and starts having a fit, and then her two servants (who came with the family to look after the kids) started having fits as well. The hysterics ended when one servant locked herself into our upstairs bathroom and the other the downstairs because our dog happened to look like a wolf.

This was moment one of culture shock.

The next moment was when our dog was roaming around the house sniffing for dropped food scraps and my cousin asked very non nonchalantly:

"Whats she searching for? Rats?"

Moment number two of culture shock. At this point I had never seen a rat in my life, and I'm pretty sure Canada has seen very few.

But the icing on the cake happened when my mom pulled the turkey out of the oven and my little cousin asked again

"Is that roast dog?"

My mother was mortified. We don't eat dog in Canada! But in Asia, they do, and they happen to eat my cousins' dogs. Actually, it's not uncommon for the servants to take the family pet home for dinner. Cultural norms vary from culture to culture and even within a culture. What is customary in one place may not be in another. It is for this reason that whenever dealing with another culture it's important to educate yourself on their customs before cooking a ham and potentially offending their religion!

I learned a lot about culture and cultural norms that holiday season and I will never forget those experiences as they served me well when I had a little sojourn in Asia myself!