My Own Family Culture

Essay Writing Competition 2024
Category: 12-15 years
- Commendation -

Senior category: Commendation

My Own Family Culture - written by Emma Zuccharello

My Own Family Culture

My name is Emma, I’m 13 years old and I am a solar girl. I live in Italy, a really beautiful country in the middle of Europe, and I think that you can really have a lot of culture scattered around Italy.

I said I live in Italy, but I’m not completely Italian. Actually my mom is not Italian, she is half Romanian and half Hungarian. So I can speak Italian and Romanian. All the members of my mother’s family speak Romanian and so I can talk with them. My mom doesn’t do things that Italian moms usually do, and this makes some differences between me and my friends. For example, my mum really likes spending time and money on shopping, and sometimes she asks me to come back home from school by myself when she is doing the shopping. I’ve hardly heard one of my friends’ mums saying that or letting my friends go home by themselves. I like having a little walk after school, so I’m totally fine with it.

Since I have east European origins, I have to respect some traditions like Romania's national party. This is on 1st December, we go to Milan with my mom’s friends to celebrate, dance and eat a lot of typical food. Generally the party lasts from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. and we have a lot of fun all night.

Another peculiar tradition of my family is at Easter when we have a special way to cook eggs. Actually, we pick some weeds in the garden, then we put them on the eggs and we close the egg in socks. After that, we boil the eggs with red onions for a few hours, and when they are ready we go to the church to have them blessed with other people of the city. After the mess, we come back home to eat those eggs during the Easter lunch.

When I go to Romania during the summer we have another sort of family tradition, since we organize a sort of Olympics game with my cousins’ friends. There are some games like a race of hay balls, jump rope and others.

As I mentioned, my mom is half Hungarian, too. We have a special recipe that makes kids eat spinach. Generally, most kids don’t like spinach or vegetables, including me. But my mom usually cooks me spinach with milk and flour following a traditional hungarian recipe and I really like it because there is no spinach flavor.

Besides my Romanian origins, I’m definitely Italian and my dad is from Sicily, so we have many other traditions. For example at Carnival we eat a sandwich with sausage and ricotta, it is so delicious. Another tradition is that in May we go into the woods to pick some special flowers named elderflower and we bring them to my grandma so that she can cook elderflower pancakes for everyone! People may notice that most of the topics I covered are concerned with food. Well it is true!

In Romania and in Sicily food is really good, and it is really a key of our culture. Moreover, food makes my family (and everyone) closer! I think that my family is a very special community, we have many different traditions, and this lets me understand that we have to respect each other's culture and traditions, that we can learn a lot from other people who have other religions, and that we should not discriminate against people just because they are different.

Everyone should be proud of his or her own culture and family, just like me!

In the Age category 12-15 years, Emma's lovely essay is commended.

Congratulations on your lovely essay, Emma! Thank you for sharing your story with all of us!

Emma attends Scuola Media Paolo VI in Tradate, Italy. Emmas's home language is Italian, English is her second language.