This blog topic actually started out as pretty challenging for me—my ethnicity doesn’t actually play much of a role in my day-to-day life, unfortunately. My dad is German and Irish and my mom is Polish and Italian, but we really don’t observe any ethnic customs. I also happen to come from what my younger brother described as “The whitest town this side of the Mason-Dixon line”. According to the 2000 Census, Seaford is 96.80% white, 3.71% Hispanic, and 0.15% black (and the percentages only get smaller from there). So as you can see…I don’t exactly belong to an “ethnic community”. I’ve been pondering this topic for days, and just a few hours ago I finally decided what it is that brings my family together. I was in my dorm’s kitchen making chicken salad while watching the Giants football game on TV. I don’t even know what I was thinking about, but then it hit me—it was so simple, I was amazed it hadn’t hit me before. My family’s dedication to football is our custom.
Now, it may seem kind of trivial, but let me explain. Football really is a cultural thing in my family. It’s a way to bring us all together, and not just physically—it bridges the gaps between generations. I’ll start with my father. He was born in 1945, 5 days before Franklin Roosevelt died. He grew up with black and white TV, McCarthyism, the space race, and JFK (in other words, the stuff that seems light years away from what my younger brother and I grew up with). Then my oldest brother Tommy was born in 1965, my sister Leslie in 1967, and my middle brother Chuck in 1969. My dad got divorced from his first wife sometime in the 70’s and married my mom, who is almost 16 years younger than him, in 1991. I was born in 1993 and my younger brother Brian came 2 years later. Yeah, we’re kind of like the Pritchetts from Modern Family. But like the Pritchetts, we all miraculously find a way to come together, and our way is football.
My dad, my older siblings, and I are all ridiculous Giants fans (the Giants were the only New York football team when my dad was a kid). My younger brother Brian, my brother-in-law Rob, and my nephew Robert are equally dedicated Jets fans. The fact that we all don’t root for the same team is really what makes football season so much fun for us. On most Sundays throughout the season, everyone except my brother Chuck (who lives in Ohio) gathers at my sister’s house to watch the Giants and Jets games. We really treat each game like its own special holiday. Leslie and I will bake, Rob and Brian endlessly discuss fantasy football, and my dad tries to keep us all from going off the deep end. The taunting, cheering, and shouting is pretty much non-stop during the day. It’s really quite a circus. Sometimes we’ll also call Chuck to keep him in on the action and discuss the previous day’s Ohio State college football game. We all know that whichever team wins that day gets bragging rights for the entire week; or, in the case of the 2007 Giants, the Super Bowl win is still used for bragging rights. One of my favorite family memories is how insane we all went when the Giants won the Super Bowl. My niece Kaylee and I were chanting “Go Eli!” at the top of our lungs as we all saw the improbable become reality. I really appreciate those Sundays even more now that I live in the dorm, because so far I haven’t been able to watch any of the games with my family; I miss getting together and spending the entire day living and dying by football. I love the fact that my four siblings and I, who theoretically should have very little in common, are brought together by our ridiculous passion for football.
One song I think describes the sense of unity my family finds in football is “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Coincidentally, it was also used this year in ads to promote the new NFL season. The verses are playful banter, which reminds me of the teasing my siblings and I love to do to each other during games. The chorus is simply, “Home, let me come home/ Home is whenever I’m with you”. That really describes my family to a T—no matter how far away we may be from one another, we always feel like we’re right at home together when we’re watching football. I felt it today when I watched the Giants by myself—when I was jumping up and down and cheering when the Giants scored the winning touchdown, it felt like I had my family right there beside me. I knew my dad was laughing because it was so unlikely, Leslie and Tommy were shouting their heads off, and Chuck was saying “YEAH!” So as you can see, the Jennings family takes football very seriously, but for a good reason—to us, football is home.
Home- Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
This was my family's Christmas card photo last year
