What You Ate for Easter Could Affect Your Family Forever
Do you have boiled eggs for Easter? Do you drink eggnog at Christmas? Chances are, just about every holiday memory of your youth is linked to some sort of food. And these memories are usually happy ones. Food is central to most families’ bonding traditions. And the impact of these traditions can last for generations.
Some holiday food traditions are deeply rooted in religious tradition while others happen by accident and end up enduring for decades. My family intentionally had lamb on Easter this past weekend in remembrance of the Lamb of God, but most of our family food traditions are accidental!
For instance, when I was very young my parents decided to have fondue dinner one year on Christmas Eve for fun after all the kids were in bed. Somehow the kids found out about it, and we’ve all been having fondue dinner on Christmas Eve for years! We also have a Valentine brunch every year with waffles and strawberries for no apparent reason. But we love it and it’s part of the rhythm of our year. Our kids never miss it!
A food tradition that enriched my childhood was my grandma’s “money cakes” for our birthdays. She’d make a cake, gently shove some semi-valuable coins into them, and then spread frosting all over the top. You had to eat carefully to avoid ingesting a coin, but my brothers and I ended up with a nice little coin collection from all those money cakes!
Holiday food traditions can also provide a way to remember family members and other heroes who have passed on. My great grandpa loved shrimp. His birthday falls on New Year’s Eve, so every New Year’s Eve our entire extended family has a shrimp dinner in honor of this beloved ancestor. Similarly, every Thanksgiving when I was young my mom would put five kernels of corn by each of our plates to represent the scanty rations the pilgrims ate during their ordeals. For each kernel of corn, we each named something we were thankful for before eating our Thanksgiving feast.
Both the shrimp dinner and the kernels of corn urged our minds back in time to remember people who are worth remembering. Whatever their origin, holiday food traditions bind us to each other, link us to our past, and give us a recurring sense of stability in a turbulent world.
One word of caution. Although some holiday foods are special partly because of the time it takes to make them (like the hasselback potatoes I made for our lamb Easter dinner this weekend!) holiday food traditions should spark more joy than they do stress. Holiday foods don’t need to be extravagant to be meaningful. If you have so many time-intensive food traditions loaded into Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that your holiday cheer is nearly depleted, it’s time to rethink and update those traditions! Don’t be afraid to retire old traditions and create brand new ones.
Here's to meaningful, doable, joyful holiday traditions that bind our families together.
With love,
Kimberly
Me and my husband