Breaking Bread and Sharing Recipes

We have entered the Holiday Season. Some would say it starts with Thanksgiving, but I almost have to believe it begins with Halloween.  I say that because Halloween involves a lot of traditions: scary costumes, ghosts, goblins, trick or treat. And trick or treat means lots of goodies: home made or store bought.

Then, comes Thanksgiving. The traditional meal for Thanksgiving has lots of variations, but most of them include turkey, gravy, potatoes, some vegetables, typically green beans, corn, sweet potatoes, dressing, salad, condiments of quite a variety, and pies, mostly pumpkin, pecan, and apple, but any, really.

After Thanksgiving, things really ramp up:  Almost every group, organization, association, and work setting has some sort of recognition of the holiday season: lunch, party, spread, desserts, gala, whatever.   We eat ourselves silly into the holidays.

Then comes Christmas, with another special meal.  Often similar to Thanksgiving, but not always. Sometime during this season, families with Hispanic backgrounds make tamales for the delicacy of the season.  Many families prefer ham to turkey.

A week later, comes New Years.  Since many people party the night before, many families do lighter meals for New Years Day.  And different people have different food traditions.  Where I grew up, pickled herring was a tradition, as was kielbasa.  In the south, Black Eyed Peas are an important food to be consumed on New Years, for good luck. http://gosoutheast.about.com/od/restaurantslocalcuisine/a/blackeyedpeas.htm 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-eyed_pea.  I have heard that Black Eyed Peas being good luck food was a  marketing ploy for canned foods. The websites indicate the tradition may be older than marketing canned foods.

And, we share recipes during this time of year, so you can have something that is important to my family in terms of food. 

I did not think about it until I was at the College of Our Lady of the Elms in the 1970's and a professor talked about the importance of sharing food and breaking bread:  She talked about how our mothers make our favorite foods when we return from an absence. She talked about how people seem to negotiate, conversate, interact better over food. She was so right.

In addition to breaking bread with each other, the other thing that seems to bind us is sharing recipes.  It makes sense:  I want you to have the recipe that I have that I so enjoy.  Even if we can not break bread together, we can be joined by common recipes. And, this is the season that recipe sharing and breaking bread predominates our social gatherings.

These are good things to appreciate and enjoy. But what is most important is to appreciate the people in our live with whom we do break bread and share recipes.