Here in Philly, the Christmas Eve tradition of the Feast of the Seven Fishes — a massive, seafood-packed meal in honor of the holiday — is a well-known and oft-celebrated event for Italian American families. But when he was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s and ’70s, Blaise Tobia never heard of it.

So, when he came to Philadelphia to work at Drexel University in the 1980s, and folks started asking him how he, an Italian American with roots in western Sicily, celebrated the tradition, he was pretty confused. “We said, ‘What?,’ ” Tobia, professor emeritus of art and art history at Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Art, Media, and Design says.