I’m not very schooled on my heritage, to be honest. It’s difficult too, when you’re a ‘Heinz 57’ like my sisters and I are. Which heritage do you chase after?
I’m one quarter of each: German, Ukrainian, Scottish and Irish. Each of my four grandparents came from a different place. My biggest influences growing up were the Eastern European parts of me. The grandparents who lived a stone’s throw from us and who I rode my bike down to see almost daily were German and Ukrainian. And really, the farming community I grew up in was mostly Ukrainian people.
My Gramma made German foods but also Ukrainian dishes a lot of the time. The interesting thing was, my Grampa was Ukrainian but he had this hang up about being “Canadian”. He was so proud to consider himself a Canadian. He was born in Canada, not in the old country and he was grateful everyday for what Canada had to offer.
So interestingly enough, he preferred to leave his Ukrainian roots, back in the Ukraine. He really detested people living out their Ukrainian ways, in Canada. He’d say this is Canada, be Canadian. If he only would have lived to see how culturally diversified Canada has become, I hope he’d change his tune.
I quite disagree with his thinking. As do most people, hopefully. I say bring your culture and your influence and let them live on. If he were here today I’d ask him ‘Grampa, then what is it to be Canadian?’. He never mentioned other cultures, checking their culture at the border, just Ukrainians. So odd.
In some ways he was a very forward thinker. He also had a great attitude about life in general. He participated in local politics and volunteered at the Lutheran Church his whole life.
He was a big strong man who, with his two brothers, cleared the land by hand. By hand! Cut down trees, worked up the ground and planted seeds in the 1930’s. He met my Gramma at a barn dance and the rest is history.
My maternal grandparents didn’t really speak too much of their ancestry either. My Gramma was Irish, her parents moved to Canada from Ireland before she was even born. She’d always tell me it was the Irish in me that craved potatoes the way I did. I’d ask for more mashed potatoes in lieu of dessert sometimes.
My maternal Grampa was born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada with his parents when he was two years old. He and my Gramma did go back and visit Scotland and Ireland when they retired but I was still quite young and don’t recall much about what they had to say about ‘going home’.
I would love to visit Scotland and Ireland someday. I did make a point of asking them where they were born etc and wrote it down, when I was still a teenager. So that someday I could hopefully go there and check it out.
So even though my upbringing could have been a plethora of cultures and traditions, it was actually really quite vanilla. I remember only the odd word, like sit down in Ukrainian, and “dummy/stupid” in German lol.
My heritage is a little bit this and whole lotta that I guess.
bloom.planted.north 
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