Mary, thank you for explaining to me while why I felt the drive to go and paint flats for our church’s teen drama performance today, even though I don’t have a kid in the show, the weather was in the high 90s and we were working outside. The flats are beautiful and that sense of accomplishment is lasting.
Regina! Good to hear from you! Amen to painting flats when everything suggests you don't HAVE to. Whether you have a kid in the show or not, you're part of that production now, and your experience of watching it is going to be different, deeper. Thank you for sharing this!
lol, my inability to stop designing sets is almost getting to be a joke! In the past theatrical year, I’ve done five out of seven church shows! So much fun.
My mom grew up in a poor immigrant family during the Depression, which means she learned to sew, cook, bake, can and preserve, and to grow her own fruits and vegetables. When I was a kid, she had embraced modern conveniences (she was a working mom, after all) but we always had a vegetable garden, a compost pile, and she sewed a lot of our clothes when I was little (because before Wal-mart and fast fashion, it was cheaper to sew your own). She liked to knit and crochet and made lots of afghans. And for special occasions, we always did things the old way: our Christmas cookies were a traditional Hungarian recipe and my job was to grind the walnuts by hand in our antique grinder; pies and cakes were baked from scratch, etc. The message was “modern conveniences are nice, but if you want something REALLY good you should grow it or make it yourself.”
So I grow my veggies and berries; make my pickles and jam and homemade ice cream, bake my own pies and cakes, make my own tomato sauce, and at Christmas my daughters and I gather together to grind the walnuts and make the cookies the old way. I’ve made them all promise they’ll always make the same cookies at Christmas with their daughters and pass down the pie crust recipe from their grandmothers.
I read somewhere that an old woman in the early 1900s was asked why she loved knitting so much and she said “it’s the only thing I do that stays done!” and that struck a chord with me. So much of housework and office work is just endlessly doing the same thing over and over - tidying up the same toys that will be strewn about the next day, cleaning things that will just get dirty again tomorrow, folding the laundry to make way for more laundry, revising the numbers in the spreadsheet, completing more documentation that will have to be resubmitted again next month, updating the PowerPoint yet again, etc. A knitted hat, a pantry full of homemade pickles and preserves, a delicious meal all provide some much-needed feelings of completion and accomplishment.
Esme, this is so lovely! I had a Hungarian grandmother, and while we have some of her handwork and her treadle sewing machine, we don’t have any treasured recipes from her. You paint such a beautiful picture of baking these traditional Christmas cookies with your daughters; I love that they’ve promised to keep the tradition alive! I also love that idea—very alive in the house I grew up in and, I hope, in the house I raised my own children in—that when you want something really special, you make it yourself. Making in today’s world is a pretty radical act; we’re groomed to consume, consume, consume and defying that in any way is very spicy.
And this is why today I will be spending a few hours in my kitchen prepping about 8lbs of cherries to make my own cherry pie filling instead of buying those sad aluminum cans in the local big box supermarket ❤️
Yes, Mary. Me and You, we make to make sense.
Mary, thank you for explaining to me while why I felt the drive to go and paint flats for our church’s teen drama performance today, even though I don’t have a kid in the show, the weather was in the high 90s and we were working outside. The flats are beautiful and that sense of accomplishment is lasting.
Regina! Good to hear from you! Amen to painting flats when everything suggests you don't HAVE to. Whether you have a kid in the show or not, you're part of that production now, and your experience of watching it is going to be different, deeper. Thank you for sharing this!
lol, my inability to stop designing sets is almost getting to be a joke! In the past theatrical year, I’ve done five out of seven church shows! So much fun.
My mom grew up in a poor immigrant family during the Depression, which means she learned to sew, cook, bake, can and preserve, and to grow her own fruits and vegetables. When I was a kid, she had embraced modern conveniences (she was a working mom, after all) but we always had a vegetable garden, a compost pile, and she sewed a lot of our clothes when I was little (because before Wal-mart and fast fashion, it was cheaper to sew your own). She liked to knit and crochet and made lots of afghans. And for special occasions, we always did things the old way: our Christmas cookies were a traditional Hungarian recipe and my job was to grind the walnuts by hand in our antique grinder; pies and cakes were baked from scratch, etc. The message was “modern conveniences are nice, but if you want something REALLY good you should grow it or make it yourself.”
So I grow my veggies and berries; make my pickles and jam and homemade ice cream, bake my own pies and cakes, make my own tomato sauce, and at Christmas my daughters and I gather together to grind the walnuts and make the cookies the old way. I’ve made them all promise they’ll always make the same cookies at Christmas with their daughters and pass down the pie crust recipe from their grandmothers.
I read somewhere that an old woman in the early 1900s was asked why she loved knitting so much and she said “it’s the only thing I do that stays done!” and that struck a chord with me. So much of housework and office work is just endlessly doing the same thing over and over - tidying up the same toys that will be strewn about the next day, cleaning things that will just get dirty again tomorrow, folding the laundry to make way for more laundry, revising the numbers in the spreadsheet, completing more documentation that will have to be resubmitted again next month, updating the PowerPoint yet again, etc. A knitted hat, a pantry full of homemade pickles and preserves, a delicious meal all provide some much-needed feelings of completion and accomplishment.
Esme, this is so lovely! I had a Hungarian grandmother, and while we have some of her handwork and her treadle sewing machine, we don’t have any treasured recipes from her. You paint such a beautiful picture of baking these traditional Christmas cookies with your daughters; I love that they’ve promised to keep the tradition alive! I also love that idea—very alive in the house I grew up in and, I hope, in the house I raised my own children in—that when you want something really special, you make it yourself. Making in today’s world is a pretty radical act; we’re groomed to consume, consume, consume and defying that in any way is very spicy.
And this is why today I will be spending a few hours in my kitchen prepping about 8lbs of cherries to make my own cherry pie filling instead of buying those sad aluminum cans in the local big box supermarket ❤️
🍒 ❤️