Being Latina, I'm super close with my family. I love them, and I love spending time with them. I love being at my grandma's house and eating her food.
We were Orthodox Jews, but we really didn't deserve it. I mean, bacon - my father said, 'Don't put bacon in the house,' but we had bacon. We didn't keep kosher. And we observed which today would be Conservative Jews. But in those days, we belonged to an Orthodox temple. So we made out we were Orthodox Jews, but we really weren't.
Both my parents are Catholic and staunch believers. I'm not a Catholic now, but I still carry part of it with me.
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family, and I think they force you to watch every James Cagney movie.
As a child growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, my connection to my Indian roots came from summer visits to New Delhi where my grandparents lived.
I'm a true country Southern girl that has always been built around family, cookouts and gatherings and being together on the holidays, singing together and laughing together. So whenever God opened doors for me to be able to travel the world and sing and do all the great things that I've done, I didn't want to lose that part so family first for me.
My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother's sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely.
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
I've always sung. My dad had a song in his heart and on his lips 24/7. A lot of the time, it was the same song and the same phrase over and over again.
For me, it's about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me, is something deeply personal. It's where I came from, my family, I was brought up in a religious household and that's very important to me.
Now me and my brother go to see him some times but he don't have much to say anymore. So we sit on his headstone with a fifth of Jack D. Here's to a long line of sinners like me.
I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.
What it depends on is someone's upbringing and the traditions and that is how you decide if you are Jewish or not.
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
There are secrets in families. That is the definition of a family.
I was raised on Marvin Gaye. Before I knew Babyface or anyone else, I knew Marvin Gaye. My mother played Marvin Gaye.
I have an enormous family because I'm from Montreal and my family's Catholic, so my dad has eight siblings and they all have kids and we all grew up in the same property on weekends and summers.
I am a Smedry, and we do ridiculous, unexpected, eccentric things like this all the time! Ha-ha!
The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
When I was a kid, we didn't really leave Cambridge, which was the town where I grew up in.
I come from a family of seven, so growing up I always thought I'd like a big family.
My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods.
When I was growing up, both my grandmothers would play the organ, and we would all sing.
My mother's side is Italian; my father's side is Jewish. We're the kind of family where every Sunday night we have dinner with all 19 of my cousins.
