11 North Carolina Habits That Give Away Someone Who Grew Up There

Local boards run every liquor store in North Carolina, town by town and county by county, on hours they set themselves.

Newcomers to the Tar Heel State pull on locked doors constantly.

These are the habits that give away someone who grew up in North Carolina and someone who didn’t.

1. Ordering Slaw Without Asking

Anybody raised around Lexington or Salisbury takes red slaw on their sandwich and never asks what turns it that color.

Ketchup does, with vinegar and a lot of black pepper behind it.

East of Raleigh, the answer flips to white slaw, chopped fine and bound with mayonnaise, sitting next to whole hog pulled off an open pit.

You pick a side at a young age.

Piedmont pitmasters cook pork shoulders in closed brick pits and sauce them redder and sweeter, while eastern cooks stay loyal to vinegar and pepper.

Newcomers look down at the plate and ask what happened to the slaw.

2. Buying Liquor on Friday

A North Carolina native fills the cooler Friday afternoon for a party that starts Sunday, and nobody in the house checks a calendar first.

Towns and counties run their own liquor stores, each board setting its own hours, and those stores stay closed on Sundays.

Kids watch their parents shop two days ahead for years before anybody explains the law to them, so the habit lands long before the reason does.

Sunday never enters the plan.

They also know which board’s store sits closest to the county line and which one turns the lights off at 9.

3. Crossing the Bridge Before Ten

People who grew up within an hour of the coast write off a summer Saturday on US-158 before the sun comes up.

No local drives it at noon if they don’t have to.

Saturday is changeover day on the Outer Banks, when one week of renters clears out and the next week rolls in, and most check-ins land in the middle of the afternoon.

So, locals cross the Wright Memorial Bridge early, or they wait for dark, since the northern beaches hang off that one span.

They’d sooner buy groceries in Elizabeth City than sit through the backup at the traffic light in Kitty Hawk with a car full of kids.

4. Eating Shrimp Calabash-Style

The order never changes.

Somebody who grew up in Brunswick County orders shrimp Calabash-style without opening the menu, which means barely breaded and straight into the fryer.

Lucy Coleman started cooking it that way in 1940, at the first restaurant in a fishing town whose welcome signs still call it the Seafood Capital of the World.

Her sister opened a second restaurant a few years behind her, and by the 1980s that town of a few hundred people supported around 20 of them.

Kids from Shallotte and Whiteville eat there on the way home from the beach every summer of their childhood, and a heavy batter tastes wrong to them forever after.

5. Dancing the Shag at Weddings

The beach music starts at a wedding reception in Wilmington, and everybody who grew up an hour from the water is already on their feet.

Nobody sits out that song.

The shag is a slow, smooth swing step built on rhythm and blues, and dancers trace it back to open-air beach parties in the 1940s, some to Carolina Beach and some to Cherry Grove over the South Carolina line.

Lawmakers made shagging the official popular dance in 2005, and the same act named clogging the official folk dance.

Half that wedding crowd learned the step as teenagers, which is why it looks easy and why almost nobody picks it up at 40.

A newcomer watches from the table.

6. Livermush on a Biscuit

A counter in Shelby puts livermush on a biscuit at seven in the morning, and the regulars who grew up in Cleveland County order it the way anybody else orders bacon.

It’s pork liver, head meat, cornmeal, and sage, pressed into a block and sliced thick, and state law says it has to run at least 30% pig liver.

You acquire that taste early.

Shelby has thrown a livermush festival since 1987, Marion and Drexel hold their own, and two companies in that same small city ship the stuff out by the truckload.

Transplants stall out on the ingredient list.

Natives ask for mustard.

7. Cutting Your Own Fraser Fir

US-421 fills with cars headed toward Boone on the first weekend of December, and half of them are going after one tree.

Fraser fir grows wild in one narrow band of the southern Appalachians, and nowhere below about 3,900 feet.

Growers up there raise most Fraser firs sold anywhere, and no other species has stood in the White House more often.

The drive is the tradition.

A native goes back to the same farm their parents used, saws the tree down themselves, and ties it to the roof for the ride home.

A newcomer buys the same species off a lot in Charlotte and never finds out it grew two hours up the road.

8. Picking a Team Before Kindergarten

Kids who grow up between Durham and Raleigh commit to a basketball team years before they can read a schedule.

Chapel Hill and Durham sit ten miles apart on U.S. 15-501, with six national championships at one end of that road and five more at the other, and Wolfpack fans in Raleigh boxed in between them.

You inherit the loyalty.

Many families keep two flags in the garage and fly whichever team won.

Many couples check the game schedule before they set a wedding date.

Ask a transplant which team is theirs, and you'll get a shrug, which is answer enough.

9. Watching the River, Not the Wind

A storm turns toward the coast, and somebody in Kinston or Lumberton opens the river gauge before the wind forecast.

Hurricane Matthew stayed mostly offshore in October 2016 and weakened as it went, and it still dropped a foot of rain 100 miles inland.

The storm killed 29 people in the state, and 24 drowned.

Water does the damage.

The Neuse, the Tar, the Cape Fear, and the Lumber crest days after the sky clears, sometimes more than a week later, so a native moves the truck to high ground and waits it out instead of celebrating when the rain quits.

Hurricane season runs to the end of November, and that gauge stays bookmarked on their phone until it does.

10. Hosting a Pig Pickin'

A graduation in Goldsboro means somebody borrows a cooker and puts a whole hog on it the night before.

Guests pull the meat off the hog themselves, plate in hand, which is where the name comes from.

Everybody brings a dish.

Gov. Bob Scott called the state the Pig Pickin' Capital of the World in a 1972 proclamation, and families had been doing it for generations before a governor said so.

Somebody sits up with the fire.

The neighbor who owns the cooker draws an invitation to every party within three counties, and he almost never says no.

11. Choosing Your Fair Day

Families who grew up going to the State Fair in Raleigh settle on their day months before the gates open, and they don't debate it.

A Tuesday and a Saturday are two different fairs.

Tuesday means the livestock barns, an open midway, and a walk back to the car that takes four minutes.

Saturday means the crowd.

The fair runs October 16 through 25 this year, and advance tickets hold at $10 for adults and $5 for kids 6 to 12 until October 15, when the gate price takes over at $13.