Community College of Denver

Weirding the Normal

Julia Sayler
Sociology 101006 Professor Megan Cortez
7 March 2016

Weirding the Normal: A Colorado State- Pueblo Football Game
The Caplow article is about Rule Enforcement without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown. This article talks about how people in the town of Middletown would give gifts. The town had gift giving for Christmas set up in many different ways. Some ways the town would do it were “Participants in this gift system should give (individually or jointly) at least one Christmas gift every year to their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters; to the current spouses of these persons; and to their own spouses” (Caplow 1315). The article also talks about Christmas lights, decorations, the tree rule, the wrapping rule, the gathering rule, the dinner rule, the gift selection rule, and the scaling rule. Caplows article goes more in-depth about how each family is supposed to honor Christmas. The tree rule, for example, says “of the forty-five married respondents with children under eighteen only two of families did not have trees” (Caplow 1308).The wrapping rule says that “a subsidiary rule requires that the wrapping be appropriate, that is, emblematic and another subsidiary rule says that wrapped gifts are appropriately displayed as a set but that unwrapped gifts should not be so displayed” (Caplow 1310). There were many different rules for many situations.
For this paper I decided to write about my experience at a college football game. This game was located at Colorado State University-Pueblo. The reason I decided to do this topic is because I used to attend college there, and football is treated like a “God”. During this activity there is always a tailgate party that starts an hour or two before the game. Along with this comes food and games for the attendees while the teams warm up. Thirty