Trojan Media Center Home: Spanish - Holiday Customs Project

Once you have chosen your country, start with a reliable source to build some background knowledge about customs and tradidtions. This is how you can gather specific search terms for more in-depth searching.

An encyclopedia is a great place to start for this kind of information.

1. Go to Encylopedia Britannica and search for your country.
2. Use the table of contents to go to Daily Life and Social Customs in the Culture section.
3. Take note of holidays and food names described there.

Now that you have specific foods and holidays to search, you can use a search engine to find more information about those items.

For example: I might search Chile holiday food or, if I know the name of a specific holiday, I can search Chile Christmas food.

Other food-related words you might try:

• cuisine
• gastronomy

When searching the internet, you'll come across a variety of websites.  A quick look at the site's URL can be your first hint about whether or not a site is reliable. What you may find:

• Blogs - can be great resources, just remember they are usually from the perspective of one person and may be limited to that person's experience
• Recipe Sites - may or may not be helpful.  It can be hard to decide if the person posting a recipe is knowledgeable on the true tradiditons
• .com sites - check and see who made the site. What is their purpose? What are their credentials?
• Tourism sites - can be helpful, but often give broad information rather than specifics
• About.com - probably not worth clicking through.
• Websites from your country - you may get to know the country ending for websites from the country you are searching.  Those can often be translated automatically and will give you a less Americanized version of the traditions.