Holidays Ahead

Buckle Up

HOLIDAYS / FAMILY

We all have our favored holidays and the tail end of the year brings a flurry of them. Here is a fun Venn diagram; one of my favorite ways to convey information and especially humor; that wraps up the holidays pretty well. When my grammar and writing helper chimed in, I realized that there really was a man named John Venn so here is his story.

I think that in the age of Twitter and Reddit, the Venn diagram has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as they seem perfectly suited for memes. Without feeling responsible for your missed deadlines, I recommend googling “Funny Venn Diagrams” in your spare time, but only if you really can spare it. You can of course Bing, or Baidu or Yandex it if you are a contrarian. I am not sure those have quite attained the verb status yet. According to CNBC, these are the holidays Americans spend the most money on:

1. Christmas

2. Thanksgiving

3. Valentine’s Day

4. Mother’s Day

5. Easter

6. Father’s Day

7. Halloween

You may be fending off Trick or Treaters tonight as the holiday season kicks into full swing with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas left on the list. Halloween started out as a Celtic festival to ward off ghosts about 2000 years ago. Pope Gregory III renamed it to All Saints Day about 1000 years later and eventually, the night before (All Souls Day) became Halloween as a holiday as we know it today. Amongst the holidays, it seems Halloween has become that occasion very focused on children. It is interesting that adults have recently begun to have adult-oriented takes on the holiday.

What the Venn diagram really stresses is how many holidays have become tied to the eating experience. I think that as families and their schedules have been more complex, the holiday traditions around food carry heightened importance. Using the good plates, having a tablecloth, and the specialty plates like gravy boats, extra forks all add to the pageantry. When we were young, my Mom really made the holiday dinner table shine. We seemed to have traditional dishes on many holidays and because they were consistent they are part of my memory forever.

Mom was of the school that repetition leads to mastery. What we served for big holidays became the tradition and the meals were so consistent that I think if there were a photograph without a date of the table, it would be difficult to mark the year. Mom just always hit the mark and regardless of the number of dishes involved, everything that needed to be warm was warm. I doubt that she would be all-in for the tendency to try to smoke the bird or brine it. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Meanwhile, my Dad might be focused on stuffing celery with cream cheese and a bit of paprika. My Dad was awesome and wanted to do his part. It just meant, unfortunately, he was within Mom’s domain. In the NFL, Mom would have reached into her cooking apron and thrown a flag for encroachment.

My wife was exceptional at that also but in a different way. C created traditions during the holidays and was always comfortable adjusting the plan. The core of the holidays was always wonderful yet she was always flexible enough to tweak the plan and I like that! I remember so clearly as the traditions of what was served on her holiday table became part of our shared celebrations. Before I was married I had never had rutabaga before. While the first few times I tried it, it was unfamiliar, I now associate it as part of the Thanksgiving table that I must have a bit of. For those unfamiliar, it is a wonderful root vegetable that seems to get better with the days as we all make those 2nd and 3rd days mixed platters of all the trimmings. While we have them mashed on Thanksgiving I tried roasting them cubed with olive oil and some seasoning and they came out great! The recipe for roasted rutabaga in the link is what I tried and they were quite good! By the way, for frequent readers, the rutabaga is also part of the Brassica genus and they are therefore related to the crucifers. If you remember that silly post from a while back All Hail Crucifer!

My most favored example of her genius at making the holidays work is the Frosty Games. One of these nights we will go there. Tonight’s post was not that long but the music and the video might make up for it. This is a song whose coverage on MTV was a bit of a trailblazer for the network. Prior to this video, there was not much coverage of African-American artists on the network. The video sort of screams Halloween. Hope to see you tomorrow as November arrives. Thanks for reading.

19+

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