Congratulations to the Winner of Our Fall 2021 Scholarship
All of the lawyers and staff members at Bey & Associates, LLC are dedicated to helping our local and nationwide communities build strong foundations that can enable us to take part in a brighter future. We decided to start a scholarship in 2017 that would give us the ability to help college students forge that strong foundation. The scholarship’s last submission period, Fall 2021, recently came to a close. We were truly humbled by the amount of applications we received as well as the exceptional high quality of every essay. All of the essays were outstanding.
We’re pleased to announce we’ve chosen a winner.
Congratulations to Peyton Winsett of Oklahoma!
Peyton will be attending Chapman University.
This submission period’s essay topic was as follows:
What’s the oddest family tradition you have? Who started it and when? What does it entail? Why is this tradition special to you and your family? Do you plan to continue it, why or why not?
Here’s her winning essay:
Tortilla Troubles…
Most family traditions consist of sweet mementos that you take with you into adulthood and hopefully pass on to your own family. There are the basic traditions, that even my own crazy family participates in, like taking annual family photos, decorating the Christmas tree together, gathering during the holidays, sharing family recipes, or coming together for weekly family dinners. However, there are some family traditions that take the cake as far as oddness goes. How about an annual tortilla fight? Yes, you read that right, an annual tortilla fight.
It was a seemingly normal Christmas evening one year- presents all unwrapped and bellies plum full. Some extended cousins near my age had convinced their parents to let them stay the night with my sister and I at our grandparents house. We were all gathered in the movie room watching a film together, when all of a sudden a tortilla flies across the distance and smacks the movie screen. Our heads spun around in an equation of both confusion and excitement to see our Nana behind us with a smile creeping across her mouth and a handful of tortillas ready for combat. We all sprint out of the movie room and each grab our own fistful of ammunition to begin the war. We would fling the flour tortillas as if they were frisbees, and chuck them like we were pitchers for a Major League Baseball team. This crossfire would continue until we were in fits of giggles on the floor. We were about ten years old when this began, and it has become an annual occurrence in our family ever since.
Now I understand how this event may seem wasteful due to the sheer fact that we are literally wasting food. This actually roots back to a story that is much more heartfelt than just pummeling tortillas at my family members. When my Nana was growing up she did not have the means to have or buy anything extra. Her family would eat the same bland meals everyday and her and her siblings would often share things due to ongoing financial struggles. When she grew up, she married my Papa and went off to nursing school. On top of her working as a cardiopulmonary nurse at the Oklahoma Heart Hospital, my grandparents had started their own HVAC company that became very profitable and provided them with more than what they needed. Her goal as a mother and grandmother was to always make sure whatever we needed we had in a plentiful amount. So naturally she would include buying extra tortillas on the grocery list. Because she would buy these tortillas in bulk, we would always end up with more than what we could eat in a year or two’s time. The thing with tortillas is that after a while they become a little too hard and stale to bite into with satisfaction, but they make for great flying saucers to launch at your least favorite sibling or cousin. Therefore, tortillas have become a staple item in my Nana’s household, just not for the reasons one may suspect.
I hope that for the sake of keeping this odd, yet entirely way too fun, family tradition alive that tortilla stocks stays bountiful in my Nana’s local grocery store until the end of time. As whacky as this activity sounds it is truly the best way to laugh the hardest you have ever laughed with the people you love the most. This goofy tradition also symbolizes much more to me than just a supply of gut wrenching giggles. This tradition symbolizes my Nana’s perseverance and work ethic to be able to provide for the generations to come after her. It also proves that even something as simple as a silly tortilla can bring a family together and create memories that will last for a lifetime. I hopes that I have the means to do this when I have a family of my own, because I will definitely keep Christmas tortilla fights a living tradition among my children, grandchildren, and all who come to gather in my loving home during the holidays
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Congratulations again, Peyton! May all your dreams come true.