An (un)finished conversation with Jutka: Christmas, childhood and festive traditions in Serbia

This paper returns to conversations about Christmas, childhood and festive traditions in Serbia, originally developed with my late colleague and friend, Professor Judit (Jutka) Raffai. Drawing on historical sources, family photographs and recordings from two focus-group conversations with adults, the paper explores how childhood memories were shaped by war, family circumstances, material conditions, cultural traditions and ethnic diversity. Attention is given to the ways participants responded to one another as they remembered, allowing similarities and differences to emerge within a shared conversational space. The paper also considers my own return to these recordings after Jutka’s death, drawing on the concept of emotional reflexivity to examine how relationships, emotions and changing circumstances influence the interpretation of remembered experience. Rather than presenting Christmas as a fixed tradition, the paper considers it as something remembered, negotiated and given meaning through people, objects, food, stories and historical change. The paper is offered as a reflective colloquium contribution and as a continuation of an unfinished scholarly conversation with Jutka.