Last weekend I returned a plastic food container to my neighbor. Days before, when she first handed it to me, it contained three slices of marble cheesecake. I returned it to her filled with homemade lasagna. In my family, a food container is never returned to its original owner empty. It’s tradition.
I became aware of this tradition when I was around five years old. While my mother and father worked days, my grandmother became my babysitter. Quite often she handed me a bowl of food covered with waxed paper and instructed me to deliver it to her next door neighbor, or sometimes to the lady who lived two doors away. In those days, you did what you were told and didn’t ask too many questions, but one day I decided to ask.
She explained that for generations her family never returned an empty bowl to a friend. (Remember there were no plastic containers in those days, the usual vessel was some type of bowl). Of course, I wanted to know why. I remember the rest of the conversation as if it was yesterday.
“The bowl of food symbolizes my good wishes that my friend’s family will always be free from want.“
I understood the term “free from want” because my grandmother used it quite often in connection with my poor eating habits, telling me how children in other parts of the world were starving, and how I was fortunate to be “free from want.” Consequently, no explanation was needed there, but I did wonder how she would answer my next question. “What about the time you put a penny in the bowl that you returned to Mrs. Bernolli?”
I distincly remembered that penny because I heard it jingling as I walked down the block and when I looked through the waxed paper into the bowl, there it was, a penny. I swirled it around and listened to it tinkle all the way to Mrs. Bernolli’s house.
My grandmother smiled. “Ah, the penny. I didn’t have enough food to share with her that day. When she received the penny, I knew she would understand. My wish to her was the same, even though I could only show it with a penny.”
Now we were getting down to the nitty-gritty. “Are we poor, Grandmom?”
“No, we are rich–in spirit. If you remember nothing else I ever tell you, child, remember this–never return an empty bowl to anyone. It’s tradition.”
I never forgot. That’s why my neighbor received a container of lasagna last weekend.
All this talk about food got me to wondering about other traditions and I found a couple of interesting ones.
On Whit Sunday in England, they have a Bread and Cheese Throwing Tradition.
Did you ever wonder where the traditions of the tiered wedding cake, and toasting the newly-wed couple came from?
Long ago in France, it was the custom for villagers to throw buns into a pile in preparation for the wedding feast. A clever baker decided to take some bun-like pastries stuffed with cream and fastened them as a pyramid, like the mound of buns, creating a tall cone of caramel-coated cream puffs called croque-en-bouche (“crisp in the mouth”). The cone may be topped with caged doves, which are released to symbolize the newlyweds’ departure from their families.
In Brittany, the wedding party and the bride and groom drink from a glass of brandy poured over a piece of white bread, symbolic of the beginning of the “toasting” custom. The couple has the last sip and eats the bread for good luck.
And, in your wildest dreams, did you ever think there could be a tradition involving April Fish?
In German an April Fools’ prank is called “Aprilscherz”, in Dutch “aprilgrap”, in Danish “aprilsnar”… you get the picture. But in some places, it is called an “April Fish”: the “poisson d’Avril” in French, the “Aprilvis” in Dutch and the “Pesce d’Aprile” in Italian.
Any kind of April Fool’s prank can be called an April Fish, but often it is a very simplest prank, consisting in the attempt to attach a piece of paper cut in the shape of a fish onto someone’s back, without that person noticing. When after some time, during which the victim is the unwitting butt of the joke, he or she finds out, everyone shouts “April Fish!” Traditionally, a real dead fish was stuck onto the victim’s back, with the intention that he would eventually notice it by its smell.
The name “April Fish” is also applied to the victim of the joke. The idea is that an April fish is a very young fish, and thus easily “caught”.
Traditions. There must be thousands of them around the globe.
In my particular case, when I stood on my neighbor’s doorstep last week and handed her the container, she felt its weight, squinched-up her eyebrows, and got this puzzled look on her face.
I laughed and gave her the short version of my story and told her, “My grandmother is making sure your family remains free from want.”
She was still smiling and shaking her head as she watched me jump back into my car and drive away.
