Hangin' with Queen Ceres

West Virginia is the most festival-crazy place I have ever lived.  It seems that every weekend, there's some kind of local event going on--especially this time of year, when many towns have harvest festivals celebrating whatever the local crop is.

But my favorite, hands down, is the Preston County Buckwheat Festival, which has taken place in Kingwood, the Preston County seat, every fall since 1938.  Kingwood is about twenty miles east of Morgantown, straight up a narrow, twisty two-lane road.

Preston County takes this community event seriously:  the county schools are closed for the duration of the festival, since so many kids are participating in one way or another...showing livestock, preparing crops or baked goods for judging, or marching in one of the innumerable marching bands in the area.

Friday is always children's day at the Buckwheat Festival, and so the midway swarms with preteens and teens out of school for the day, scoping out the rides, games, food, and each other before the day's big event, the kids' parade.  

You have never seen a parade with so much royalty:  there's Queen Ceres and King Buckwheat, of course, but there are also innumerable princesses, junior princesses, and Little/Tiny/Baby Miss Valley District, plus visiting royalty from near and far.  No one, it seems, reaches adulthood in Preston County without having been some kind of festival princess or attendant.

King Buckwheat. After I took this photo, he blew me a kiss.  Swoon!

Queen Ceres

For me, the highlight is always the buckwheat pancake feed at the Kingwood VFD Hall.  It's a huge building, filled end-to-end with banquet tables, and for eight bucks you get a KVFD plate loaded with all the pancakes you can eat, two enormous pieces of homemade sausage, and a half pint carton of whole milk.  Butter and syrup are on the shared tables, and in the past, I've actually seen Queen Ceres herself--tiara and all--busing tables, pouring coffee refills, and bringing extra pancakes to diners. 

We don't get there every year--often the weather is chilly and rainy.  But today could not have been a more picture-perfect day to go:  72 degrees with bright, warm sunshine.  

That, and discovering that one of the prizewinning goats was named Katniss, made it a perfectly lovely day out.

Katniss is the goat on the other side of the fence--the one you can't
see very well.  Camera-shy, just like her namesake.

Pepperoni Rolls

Pepperoni rolls are a local foodway here in northern West Virginia (and they come with a long origin narrative about having started out as food for guys working the mines).

Rose has had pepperoni rolls on the brain since talking about them in her folklore class recently. So when we saw some pre-packaged ones up on Shopping Mountain today, we thought about buying them to have during the Buckeyes basketball game. Before we even got them in the cart, though, I said, "Hey, why don't we just buy a big pepperoni stick and make our own with the pizza dough I've got thawing out?"

(We often have pizza on a Friday night, making enough dough one week for two weeks' worth of pizza, with the extras frozen and defrosted. We had missed our regular pizza night this week, so it was thawing for tonight.)

Of course, the big pepperoni stick was actually a good bit cheaper than the whole bag of rolls, and the pepperoni itself was good and spicy.

It was easy enough to cut it to length and to mix in some equally lengthy mozzarella (in the distinctly non-foodie-approved form of 'string cheese' that we had left over from a visit from Justin, Rose's nephew).





I rolled 'em up in small bits of pizza dough, sealed on the edge and at the ends; Rose brushed them with some olive oil and sprinkled on a few spices; and then we baked them until they seemed done. They came out of the oven looking pretty much like you would expect.




Served with a spinach salad and dipped in tomato sauce, they came out more like tubular calzones than the traditional local pepperoni rolls (which have more of a dinner-roll crumb, as they would say on tv), but they were quite tasty, for all that.

B+, I think, and better than the Shopping Mountain ones, I'm pretty sure.

Cartoon meme followup

So, in the last post I described the cartoon-character meme that swept Facebook last weekend, and mentioned that the alleged  "purpose" of using a cartoon image as one's profile picture was to raise awareness about child abuse.  Specifically, the standard phrasing of the call to change one's profile picture, which people posted as their status after they changed their picture, went something like this:

Change your FB profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal? To not see a human face on FB until Monday, December 6th. Join the fight against child abuse...copy & paste this to your status to invite your friends to do the same.

Something about that last sentence, as I said, "set my folklore antennae a-wigglin'." 

Well, sure enough, yesterday Tom showed me a second "plea" that one of his former students had posted as her Facebook status later in the weekend (apologies for the dreadful grammar, but this is exactly as it appeared):

CHANGE YOUR PROFILE PICS BACK!!!! - This cartoon thing has been set up by a pedafile using a registered charities name to entice kids. apparently on the 6th dec you will be kicked off fb if u have cartoon pics. The more folk that put up cartoon pics the harder it is ...for the police to...catch .......these sickos!!!!! PLEASE RE-POST It was on this evenings news.

Classic!  The strange connection between cartoon characters and child abuse clearly struck some folks as suspicious, giving rise to this "explanation."  

The "it was on this evening's news" phrase is straight out of traditional urban legendry--the old "I know it's true because it was on TV/in the paper" truth claim.  And the threat at the end--"change your pic back or you'll get booted from Facebook"--echoes the trend in e-mailed legends to ensure that the recipient forwards them to others with a menacing guilt trip:  "If you care about the women in your life, you'll forward this to everyone you know!!!"  In this case, though, if you don't post this as your status, apparently it's your own damn fault if all your friends disappear from Facebook.

I know I'm a total geek, but I was delighted to see this.  More evidence that folklore is infinitely adaptable to new contexts.

And yes, it's on Snopes.  Grrr.

Dia de los Muertos

Ever since living in Colorado, I've been fascinated by Dia de los Muertos, which seems like a much healthier way to ritualize death at this time of year than the usual Halloween celebration. 

This is the first year, though, that I've been motivated to actually put together an altar.  Given my dad's death last November, and the fact that next Saturday we'll be going to Grantsville, WV, for a memorial service as his ashes are finally laid to rest in the cemetery there, this seemed like the year to construct one.

Mine isn't traditional, but then, I'm a gringa and a lapsed Protestant borrowing this ritual (and I hope it's borrowing, and not co-opting or abusing).  On the other hand, if the Smithsonian can have a Dia de los Muertos Festival in Second Life, I guess "traditional" is a target that's moving even faster than I'd imagined.

There are a few traditional elements, though, namely the sugar skull, which I bought last year at, of all places, the Appalachian Gallery a few blocks away.   Ironically (or fittingly), I bought it the weekend that my parents were visiting, when my dad first started having symptoms from his brain tumor.

The beautiful hanging behind the altar is a piece created by Rita Flores de Wallace, a Mexican-American folk artist from Denver who was a good friend of the Greeley museum's folklorist, Georgia Wier.  This is the first time I've actually hung it up since we got it just before moving back east.  I wish you could see the whole thing--the bottom half is obscured by the altar.  But it is whimsical and colorful and full of amazing detail.

So, on this Day of the Dead, I honor and remember my dad, especially (and hope his spirit enjoys those wasabi peanuts and red-pepper flakes, and plays his harmonica and pitch pipe).

But there are also photos and mementos here of others who are on my mind today and often:  my late brother-in-law Terry (some garlic there for him); Tom's grad-school advisor, Nick Howe;  and of course, my friend Jay.  On the other side are photos and tributes to our old cat Lucy and to my sister's dear old dog Cecil.

None of them forgotten on this holiday, or ever.

Suffering fools? Gladly!

There's a family story among the Hathaways about my Dad's grandfather, a physician who also owned and ran a pharmacy in Grantsville, West Virginia.  As a kid, my dad used to hang out there after school sometimes, and one day some old timer came into the store and started yammering on about psoriasis.  "It comes from the bones, y'know!" he insisted, suggesting that the disease somehow leaked out of the bones and rose up through the skin, where it manifested itself.

"Dr. Dye" (as my great-grandfather is invariably called) just nodded and grunted in a neutral way, neither agreeing or disagreeing, but allowing the guy to have his say.  Eventually, the old-timer exhausted his theory and left.

My dad immediately said, "Grandpa, you know that's not what causes psoriasis!  Why'd you let that guy go on and on like that when you knew he was wrong?'

Dr. Dye replied, "The man's an idiot."

Now, that phrase gets bantered around with some frequency in my family--it is, in fact, one of several examples I'll often use to explain the concept of the kernel story to my folklore students:  the "punch line" of a story that's so well known in a small group that they almost never retell the whole story--they just use the phrase.

"The man's an idiot" functions in more or less the same way as the proverbial saying "Never argue with a pig. It just frustrates you and annoys the pig."  Only, I guess, it's a little more harsh.  But that, apparently, was Dr. Dye.

I've always found the story, and the phrase, both funny and perplexing.  It reflects my family's tendency to avoid conflict whenever possible, though it contradicts another less-than-charming drive that most of us share:  the need to be right.

The phrase came to mind last week when I had an advising appointment with an incoming transfer student...and her helicopter parents.  Her father, in particular, was in a complete dither, going on and on about which of her credits counted in which ways, and badgering me about getting her two English courses to count so that she could have more elective hours available, because he wanted her to take education classes on the side.

Meanwhile, it was the end of the first day of classes and this young woman hadn't yet registered for a single class, or paid her tuition.  It seemed to me there were other, more urgent things to deal with--the transfer credit issue could wait, and certainly the question of taking education classes could, especially since every time he brought it up, the student rolled her eyes and yelled, "But Dad, I don't want to be a teacher!"

Long story short:  what was scheduled to be a fifteen-minute appointment took over an hour.  And I let it happen.  Why?

Well, my therapist would (and did) say that I needed to recognize how their emotions overwhelmed me sooner, so I could step into my authority and exercise "empathic assertiveness," acknowledging everyone's stress and then getting down to brass tacks.  And of course, she's right.

She was also right, though, when she suggested that part of what happened was that the situation engaged my curiosity:  What's up with these people?  Just how freaked out are they?  Is this guy as much of a psycho helicopter parent as he seems to be?

I suspect that's what was going on with Dr. Dye, too:  Just how nutty is this idiot's theory?  How long will he go on spouting it before he runs out of steam?

And sure, it can be perversely entertaining to let people spin themselves out.  But it's a real problem when they actually need your help, and you've lost complete control of the situation.  And then there's always the nagging worry about not wanting to be a doormat, or to have people think that you suffer fools gladly.

 But you have to pick your battles, too. 

For me, the family story is a better clue to the real problem, and the possible solution.  Yeah, thinking guys like the psoriasis expert or the helicopter dad are idiots makes it easy to dismiss them, but it doesn't get anyone anywhere.  I need an addendum to the phrase--something like, "The man's an idiot, and I need to figure out whether he's the kind of idiot I need to A) Humor;  B) Confront; or C) Get the hell away from as quickly as possible."

In the meantime, there's always Dr. Dye's other famous saying to fall back on:  "Grandson, if you don't amount to a hill of beans in your life, have a kind word for every man and always tip your hat to the ladies."

Photo of Dr. Dye on the front porch of his home in Grantsville, taken by my Dad circa 1941.

Two and a half jokes.

So I was standing in line at the Morgantown post office today (where you always have to stand in line, because that's the way it is). Anyway, while I was waiting, one of the postal clerks behind the desk is having a chat with the old geezer standing in front of him. Suddenly, the clerk gets this gleam in his eye.

"Did you hear that FedEx and UPS are going to merge?" he asked.

"No, I didn't," said the geezer.

"Yeah, they're going to call the company FedUp!"

Smiles all around, if not outright laughter.

Anyway, as you might imagine, first thing I did when I got home was to wait around for my opportunity to work this joke into the casual conversation at the old homestead. Which I did. And Rose responded with "At least they're not shooting each other down there!" Which makes it two postal worker jokes in one day. Or at least one and a half.

Back to work on Monday.

Which reminds me of another old joke: So, once upon a time, a guy was sentenced to an eternity in Hell, and he was being given a tour of the place by Satan himself, who showed him from one room to another, and told him he could take his pick of places to stay and punishments to endure for the rest of time. In the first room, he saw a bunch of people standing on their heads on a solid wood floor, while a host of devil's crafty minions stood around making sure no one was slacking off. It looked painful and uncomfortable both.

So the devil showed him to the next room, where an even larger number of people (and a corresponding number of minions) were standing on their heads on a solid concrete floor. Even worse.

So, finally, the devil took him into the next room, where an even greater number of people were standing around, knee-deep in manure, sipping coffee out of china cups and chatting with the minions. "This is the room for me," says the guy, and the devil says, "All right, follow me: we just need to clear up some paperwork." And as they walk out the door, the guy hears the chief of the devil's minions shout out "All right, coffee break's over! Back on your heads!"

And so that's probably what I'll be thinking about when I go back to work.

I was rooting for the Big Bad Wolf

In a previous post, I mentioned how much I loathed Jackson Pearce's Sisters Red, a contemporary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, featuring two sisters who become werewolf hunters after their grandmother is attacked and killed by one.

I suggested I might blog about it eventually, but I couldn't really say it any better than the Book Smugglers did in their recent review.

I wanted to like this novel.  Really, I did.  It had some clever twists:  the address of the apartment building the characters live in is "333," a reference to LRRH's tale-type number (AT 333), and the werewolves are called the fenris, from the Old Norse word for wolf.  Plus, I get that LRRH has always been either implicitly or explicitly sexual.  Just do a Google search for LRRH images to see how adult and tarty LRRH often appears, or read this version of the tale.

But does that mean the LRRH figure actually has to dress up like a hooker and go out deliberately trying to draw wolves to her?

Thanks, but I prefer my "girl power" a little less girly.  And a whole lot less creepy.

Sisters Red is book I almost put down (nay, almost threw across the room) several times.  I haven't had that feeling about a book in a long time.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who sort of feels compelled to finish a book once I've gotten through a significant chunk of it.  I'm curious:  do you all share that feeling, or are you perfectly OK with never finishing a book that you've decided you don't like...even if you've gotten more than halfway through it?


Artwork:  WPA poster by Kenneth Whitley (1939)

"Since when is Easter a jokey holiday?"

--thus spake commenter "Joan" in response to this post on one of my favorite blogs, Cake Wrecks. I don't often read the comments there, since there are usually scores of them, mostly from readers trying (unsuccessfully) to out-wit the Blogger, Jen.

But this post, and the comments, caught my folklorist's eye: what is up with a cake shaped like a lamb with a cigarette, or what looks like a cigarette, in its mouth?

To summarize the commenters' theories:

• It's Joe Camel.
• The lamb is smoking to signify the end of Lent, and the enjoyment of vices one might have given up for Lent, such as smoking.
• The cigarette is supposed to represent a paintbrush, and is colored on the end to suggest the lamb's blood that was used to paint door frames during the original Pesach.
• What looks like a cigarette is actually a scroll, and is in the lamb's mouth to illustrate a passage from Revelations: "Then I saw, between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. The Lamb went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne."

Perhaps the best comment, though, was from a guy who wondered why whoever took the photos hadn't thought to ask the baker about the cakes' meaning. A little fieldwork goes a long way, folks.

I'll be interested to see if Jen posts a "definitive" answer, but I suspect there isn't one...like all good traditions, there are going to be multiple interpretations of the same object.

I am puzzled, though, by the comment that Easter isn't a jokey holiday. Granted, it does mark a very somber occasion, but it's still a holiday, which means it's inherently festive.

Yesterday I took to my folklore class a bunch of parody Passover songs that a former student collected as part of a fieldwork project on her family's Pesach traditions. I'd never come across anything like them before, and was blown away by the collection, and by her description of how they were incorporated into her family's Seder. Here are the lyrics to a couple of my favorites:

My Passover Things (to the tune of “These Are a Few Of My Favorite Things”)
Cleaning and cooking and so many dishes,
Out with the hametz, no pasta, no knishes.
Fish that’s gifellted, horseradish that stings,
These are a few of our Passover things.

Matzoh and karpos and chopped-up haroset,
Shankbones and kiddish and Yiddish neuroses.
Tante who kvetches and uncle who sings,
These are a few of our Passover things.

Motzi and maror and trouble with Pharaohs,
Famines and locusts and slaves with wheelbarrows.
Matzoh balls floating and eggshell that cling,
These are a few of our Passover things.

When the plagues strike,
When the lice bite,
When we’re feeling sad…
We simply remember our Passover things,
And then we don’t feel so bad.

There’s No Seder Like Our Seder (to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”)

There’s no Seder like our Seder,
There’s no Seder I know.
Everything about it is halachic,
Nothing that the Torah won’t allow.
Listen how we read the whole Haggadah
It’s all in Hebrew
’Cause we know how.

There’s no Seder like our Seder,
We tell a tale that is swell:
Moses took the people out into the heat,
They baked the matzoh
While on their feet.
Now isn’t that a story that just can’t be beat?
Let’s go on with the show!

Even the most somber of holidays need festive elements--in fact, somber holidays are perhaps even more inclined toward "jokiness," to lighten the mood. Christians hide eggs, summon forth the Easter Bunny, eat chocolate rabbits and marshmallow chicks--jokey!

Both Pasque (Easter) and Pesach (Passover) are probably the most "mysterious" of holidays in each tradition: Jesus was resurrected? The Red Sea parted? In a way, it seems the only response to great mystery is great mirth. And really, doesn't Easter ultimately commemorate the greatest practical joke ever pulled off? "You thought you killed me...Ha-ha!"

Several other commenters noted that the lamb cake isn't exclusive to Easter celebrations, either, but that in some places, they are also traditional at a child's First Communion: the kid gets to lop off the lamb's head, and--in some instances--the head and neck have been filled with grenadine so that red "blood" oozes out when the head is chopped off. Now that's a jokey tradition.

My friends Mike and Don annually create a Jell-O tableau fashioned after a famous scene in The Ten Commandments (see past examples here). And I'm waiting with bated breath for the Washington Post to reveal the winners of this year's Peeps Diorama Contest.

Then there's this fabulous "Facebook Haggadah," and Erica over at The Good Old Days laments not buying a set of "Ten Plagues" finger puppets she saw in a catalog years ago.

However, my all-time favorite inquiry into the sheer absurdity of holiday traditions is David Sedaris' brilliant essay, "Jesus Shaves," about trying to explain the Easter Bunny to his fellow language students when he first moved to France. Listen to it below--my summary can't do it justice. (Longish, but totally worth it for the ending. Seriously.)



UPDATE 4/11/09: The Washington Post Peeps Diorama contest winners are online!

More tales of ritual holiday child abuse

...and then I promise, I'm going to be done.

But when I opened the Columbus Dispatch here at my parents' this morning, there was yet another story about an odd Christmas tradition of terror and mayhem, this time from Iceland, where a mountain hag named Gryla, her husband Leppalud, and their thirteen nasty sons, the "Yule Lads," threaten to carry bad children off and eat them.

The article includes examples of similar traditions from Italy and Austria. After reading this piece, I have to revise my original assumption that the figure who beat my friend's father in Vienna was the Belsnickle...sounds more like he was attacked by Krampus. (These distinctions are so important! ;^)

If you click to read the article, please do ignore the Cox News Service journalist's conclusion that all of these things are "Christmas mythologies borrowed from pagan folklore." As Erica neatly pointed out in a comment to the last post, the only valid Grand Unifying Theory is the one that reminds us that "it's all in your head"!

Bigfoot and Santa, separated at birth?

...That's essentially the theory of Jeffrey Vallance, whose story of making this connection in the deep woods of Lapland is pretty compelling.

I like the connections he makes between the Sami "Snömannen," Big Foot, the Grinch, and Santa, though I don't buy his assertion that "Santa Claus, the wildman and Snömannen must spring from the same ancient source." Why, O Why, must such interesting and loose cultural connections always be tied up with one impossible Unifying Theory (Which Is Also Always Ancient)? Isn't the paradox of parallel diversity more intriguing?

I found Vallance's article by way of Cryptomundo, a blog about "cryptozoology (the study of unknown, hidden, and as yet to be verified animals)," by way of a BoingBoing post that featured this family tree, drawn by Vallance:


I'm relieved to see that Vallance's theory includes a hefty dose of humor. But the real reason I'm re-posting this here is because the Wildman family tree includes the Bellsnickle (sic)!

So next time you're out in the woods, kids, don't worry about bears, or even Biggie himself--beware the Belsnickle!

Ephemera, the holiday edition

It seems like a good time to trot out some of the more festive holdings from our vast collection of ephemera.

Tom tells me these German Santa postcards are relatively valuable, especially as the Santas aren't wearing the typical red garb, but purple. This antique-postcard site features some similar examples, and suggests that the one on the right is a "Belsnickle Santa."

The Belsnickle seems to be haunting me lately. Recently, a friend told me that her father was in Vienna, and had been beaten by the Belsnickle, a character who travels around with Santa and sort of plays "bad cop" to Santa's good cop. The Belsnickle carries a stick and hits those he thinks have been bad. My friend wasn't sure why her father was targeted, other than being a tourist, and an American tourist at that.

When I was teaching at Ohio State, a student in one of my folklore classes there did a wonderful (and slightly disturbing) fieldwork project about her own family's tradition of the Belsnickle, though she didn't use that term. Every Christmas Eve, one of her family members would dress up as Santa and break into the house, carrying a stick s/he would use to "beat" the kids. Before you start "tsk"-ing, there was more chasing and brandishing of the stick than any "beating," and the kids would scream in mingled horror and delight...it sounded not unlike the thrill of going to a staged haunted house at Halloween.

This student's family was German-American, and had lots of other typical German-American holiday traditions to accompany this--the usual foodways and the pickle ornament, for example. In doing some trolling around for information about the Belsnickle, I discovered a site that claims that this is an Appalachian custom, which is interesting given the stereotypical view of Appalachian folklore being rooted exclusively in Scots-Irish tradition.

The description of the Belsnickle's travels reminds us, again, that Christmas used to be a much more raucous festival of misrule than it is these days: lots of drinking, going from door-to-door demanding food and libations, and general bad behavior. We now seem to have limited that kind of thing to New Year's Eve.

Anyway, enough of the folklorist ranting--more ephemera!

Here's one of my favorites: a card presumably intended for a husband to give his wife, circa the 1930s-1940s, I'm guessing. The dishcloth on the front is actually a small piece of gingham fabric!


Ships seem to have been a popular Christmas-card theme in the 1920s and 1930s; why, I'm not sure, other than the usual church = ship connection. We bought all of these in Colorado, so it's not because they came from a coastal location. I love the stylized look of these.


This one, at least, clearly seem to be referencing the "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In" carol:




And finally, my all-time favorite. I distinctly remember finding this one: I was sorting through a box of postcards and such at an antique mall in Fort Collins, and spotted the black-bordered envelope. Having never seen an actual Victorian mourning card, I thought I'd finally found one. And sure enough, when I opened it up, the inside card also had a black border. But here's what it says:


On that cheerful note: happy holidays, dear readers! Hope it's a peaceful and merry few weeks for you, and that you don't get beaten by the Belsnickle (unless that's what you asked for).

It came from the basement

I've been reading the first set of papers for the ethnographic writing class I'm teaching this semester, in which I asked the students to research and write about a family story, custom, or foodway.

One of the papers I read today was about a dish the student's family called "cornstarch": basically, a cooked chocolate pudding of cocoa powder, sugar, and milk thickened with the eponymous ingredient and then served warm over white bread or biscuits. I'd actually heard about this dish previously--called "chocolate gravy"--from a student in Colorado whose family originally came from the South. In both cases, the dish wasn't served as dessert, but as a meal; my current student's family traditionally ate it with hot dogs.

Yeah, gross, I know, but in both cases the students traced the origins of this dish to the Depression. In that context, and especially in rural Appalachia, the dish makes perfect sense: quick, easy, filling, with a high calorie-to-cost ratio. When we study foodways, I like to remind students that the luxury to eat what we want, when we want, in any season is a very new phenomenon.

So, it's no surprise that my parents, who both grew up during the Depression, hold onto things for a long time. Sometimes this works out beautifully, like when we were watching some old home movies one Christmas and the projector bulb burned out. My dad sprung up, saying that he thought he had a spare in the basement, and a few minutes later came upstairs with an entire box labeled "projector bulbs." The show was back on.

Other times, though, this instinct is a little more suspect. Several years ago, Tom and I were visiting and decided to make a brunch casserole that called for frozen hash browns. I seemed to remember seeing some in the basement freezer, and sent Tom down to get them. When he came back up with them, I took one look and decided we needed to go to Kroger's to get a new bag: the pricetag (yes, a genuine, stick-on pricetag) was from a grocery store chain that had closed in the 1980s.

My dad also had an ancient jar of Postum in the cabinet. I mean, it had to be at least 30 or 40 years old. I'd never seen anyone in the household drink Postum, ever. I suggested that perhaps it could be thrown away, and he recoiled at the very thought: it was Postum! How could it go bad? Upon opening the jar, though, we saw that the contents were glommed together in a hard mass--not the mixable powder it was supposed to be.

No problem, claimed Dad: it could be reconstituted in some water to make a kind of Postum concentrate. Which he did. And, to prove a point, he put some Postum sauce in hot water and drank it. The jar mysteriously disappeared shortly afterward.

I heard somewhere recently that with food prices skyrocketing, people (and restaurants) are throwing away much less food, which is making things difficult for food banks and shelters. Bad for those organizations, but perhaps good for us, who tend to forget that most of the rest of the world doesn't eat like we do--especially not when they're at war. Seems to me some government-imposed rationing, like there was during WWII, might make timelines for ending the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq seem a lot more appealing to our more bellicose citizens.

Now, I'm not advocating digging that old Postum out of the trash can and savoring every last crusty bit with righteous frugality. But we probably could all be more grateful for the abundance we have. For myself, I hope to be somewhere near the Hathaway basement come the Apocalypse, since there's enough down there to subsist on for at least as many decades as stuff has been accumulating there.

P. S. I wish I did have that jar of Postum now: apparently, Kraft Foods discontinued it this past January, and some members of the Seventh-Day Adventist and LDS churches--which both eschew caffeine--are up in arms about it. There's an unopened jar selling on Amazon for $150...you'd think that rehydrated Postum might bring a few bucks, anyway.

In case you're still in doubt about the historio-cultural significance of Postum, check out this item from the Smithsonian's archives.

--With thanks to Historiann's blog on "retro recipes" for additional inspiration.

Collections

I come from a family of collectors, I have to admit, and one of the pieces of wisdom passed down to me by my collecting parents was the following: to have a collection you must have no fewer than three of something. If you only have two of something, I guess it's just clutter.

[Another pearl from the same oyster: if it's worth less than 75 dollars, its a vase (rhymes with "case"), if it's worth more than 75 dollars it's a vase (rhymes with "schnozz"). Now that I think about this one, though, I'm sure inflation has probably altered this equation. Maybe it should be 100 dollars or more by now.]

Elsewhere here on Romantoes, on the "ephemera" blogs, readers can see parts of one of our collections. My most recent collection (it just reached the critical size) consists of a collection of glass canes, the Ohio-valley glassworker's preferred version of that old folk-arts classic, the hand-made walking stick. The joke of the glass cane, as I hope to explain one day (who isn't always happy to have a joke explained to them?), is echoed in two other classics of glassworker's folk-culture: the glass hammer and the glass chain.

But really, the whole purpose of this blog is to encourage our numerous regular readers to chime in: so tell us, what's your latest collection? What have you acquired recently that lifts a couple of useless pieces of clutter to the much more valued status of a collection?