C’est moi!
Here I am!
I’m Andrea and I live in the “City Above Toronto” in Ontario, Canada. I come from a Hungarian family where folk music, folk dance and doing things with your hands have great value. I have a background in Jewellery and Metalsmithing, but really I’ll make just about anything.
Foundling Folk in a nutshell
Basically, the aim of Foundling Folk is to take traditional crafts, customs and ways of living and make them relevant to modern families.
What’s up with that?
Traditional ways of life can and should be translated into a format applicable to modern families.
Cultural values are constantly changing and developing but perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate those “outdated” values of our grandparents and great-grandparents and see how they can be applied to a simpler way of living today.
In a society that’s constantly being bombarded by consumerism, packaged in sex appeal and served along with a huge dose of guilt or even fear of stepping outside the norm, being different, thinking different, looking different is not just hard, but an uphill battle.
I want my children to grow up knowing who they are and where they come from. To not feel like they lose something by holding to different traditions, ways of thinking or for having a different opinion. They indeed have a place in today’s society. Folk is the avenue I choose to instill these values.
Now, I have to say that most of the traditions I talk about on this site have a basis in Christianity, and often have even older roots. So let’s just put this out there:
You cannot expect others to honour and respect your beliefs if you do not respect theirs. This site is neither pro nor anti religion of any sort.
Having said that, the great thing about folk traditions is that you can take from them what speaks to you the most and incorporate those aspects into your daily lives. Ol’ St. Nick will be visiting our house twice this December: once on the Hungarian traditional day of December 6th (his feast day when he’ll be making a final check to see that we were all good this year) and again on the more North American Christmas Eve.
But I’m straight up North American. What about me?
This site is for everyone. Period. Canadians have different traditions than Americans. Heck, you’ll find one set of beliefs on PEI and another in Vancouver! You are who you are and your family has it’s own traditions. That’s cool. I always wonder when the first anthropological treatise on the culture of tailgating is going to come out. There is value there too.
So whether you shuttle your kids from piano lessons to soccer matches or from folk dance classes to Croatian/Hungarian/Greek school, we love you and hope you’ll join us as we explore the folk world out there!
Foundling Folk 