In these post-Halloween days, I allow the gels to have one piece of trick-or-treat candy each after dinner.
In addition to keeping the tooth rot and calorie intake to a minimum, this policy has other interesting effects, promoting, for instance, a keen discussion and analysis of which kind of candy is to be chosen on a particular night. And to this end, it also promotes careful surveys and valuations of inventory, as well as a healthy barter. It is fascinating to watch the gels trying to make deals with one another as they strive to obtain their favorites while unloading that which they don’t particularly like.
Anyway, last evening as the eight year old was busy running through her stock, she began to ask me about trick-or-treating when I was a kid. Specifically, as she held up each kind of treat, she asked if it was around when I was her age – Snickers, Mounds, Reese’s Cups, M&M’s, Three Musketeers, etc., etc. And as she went through the list, it occurred to me that, in fact, all of them had been. It’s something close to 35 years since I last went trick-or-treating, and yet Halloween candy remains for the most part fundamentally unchanged. The realization of this conservatism amused me.
Also amusing was a game the six year old played with her M&M’s. First, she divided them up into groups by color. Next, she put together a chain based on a repeating pattern of those colors (orange, blue, brown, green, red, as I recall). Then she proceeded to eat them one by one. As she ate them, she sang, assigning a different note to each color. Because she had more of some colors than others, the pattern broke down toward the end of the line, with the last three M&M’s all of the same kind. She sang these last three notes in a decrescendo, ending pianissimo. It was all really quite pretty.
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November 7, 2008 at 2:56 pm
The Abbot
I have been meditating a lot lately on a related subject. My worldview can be characterized by a great conservatism, and if I could come up with a sentence that describes my mission in life, it would be “Preserve what is ancient and holy.”
But lately I’ve been spending time on a lesser corollary of that precept, which I call “Preserve what is traditional and good.”
I see in the world around us not only the horror of the loss of the ancient and holy, but also a loss of the merely traditional and good. Traditions are important because they remind us of our past, of the fleeting course of time, and of people who came before us and cared about us. Christmas is understood by all as a good thing; not only because of the holy and ancient religious aspects of it, but also because of the traditional and good aspects of it. Watching Rudolf, for instance, and seeing the Norelco ad where Santa rides away on an electric razor — part of my generation’s childhood, traditional and good. It reminds me of the passage of time, and of people who are gone.
I have been studying the craft of cooking. It is a traditional and good thing that is largely being lost due to a number of factors — the hectic pace of life, the prevalence of standardized, inexpensive food, and the increasingly short attention span we all have. Cooking is one of those “traditional goods” we are losing — or, more properly, which are in need of preservation through care.
Last night I made a traditional chocolate custard straight out of the Larousse Gastronomique — a dish whose roots are probably more than a hundred years old. It required a fair amount of technique — a double boiler to melt the chocolate, a bain marie to cook the custards in their ramekins. The result was good — perhaps not as consistent or smooth as a modern chocolate pudding, and certainly not as sweet, but better because it was real, and traditional — the French cooks whose recipes got included in the 1931 Larousse ate something very similar to what I ate. It was closer to the Platonic form, the Ur-custard, the thing-in-itself, and somehow to the truth.
Traditional things appeal to us because they remind us of eternal things.
November 7, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Robbo
Yup. I’ve been trying all day to remember that line – is it Chesterton’s? – about tradition being the democracy of the dead, giving votes to our ancestors.
As you can imagine, I firmly believe this to be true.
November 8, 2008 at 2:54 am
The Abbot
Chesterton, from Orthodoxy.