I’ve never quite understood why people take pictures of their plates of food. Photography very effectively records events, but display – while delightful – is food’s least useful aspect, and photos do not hold smell, taste, nor significant nutrition.
I do have two photos of me with a birthday cake. In one I’m 13, and the other I’m 49. In one, I am giddy and giggling with delight. In the other, I am 13 years old.
Those were both really good cakes, and I distinctly remember the taste of each cake when I look at those photos, even though I do not remember other details about those days.
In a sense, BIRTHDAYS ARE CAKES, or at least candles in a sweet thing that you end up eating for dessert, or really dessert-and-a-half because you didn’t fill up on dinner in anticipation of the sweet thing with the candles in it that you were going to get an extra piece of because it’s your birthday.
I mean, we can have cake any other day, but that wouldn’t be birthday cake.
With Halloween, it’s the candy.
I suppose the special part could be that you’re allowed to go door to door and people just give it to you, but it wouldn’t feel the same if we were getting school supplies or tax advice. It’s the candy.
Yes, there is candy at Easter but we have to search for it, and complications regarding the social contracts involved in Valentine’s Day candy weigh it down – sure, it comes straight to you with little effort, but then somebody wants to hold your hand or something. Halloween night it’s just us, a bag, and the six carbon molecule glory of sucrose. There is no other night like Halloween.
Except that there is. Every other night is just like Halloween.
Save solstices and equinoxes, days and nights are pretty much days and nights. Halloween is not a holiday because of the night. It’s the candy.
Somewhere through the forests of fir trees, beyond the fields of pumpkins, behind the shiny shelves of Target™ stores stand The Holidays. Maturity, (which I haven’t yet experienced directly but have waiting in my Amazon cart) brings the wisdom which allows one to define such days on one’s own terms; not measuring against Martha Stewart’s style or Andy William’s glee, but instead challenging us to discover and defend what we believe is Most Important. To me, the Holiday Meal defines everything.
Meals are essential and ephemeral; they briefly exist, are enjoyed, then disappear like sunsets, yet can be quite powerfully anticipated. The most intense demonstration of this principle is of course displayed by the domestic housecat every morning at 4:57 am, but a more measured example comes at the specific days this time of year where we look forward to sitting with our chosen or randomly genetically assigned to us families, eating foods traditional for our house but maybe not anyone else’s.
In my experience, holidays don’t just surround these meals, HOLIDAYS ARE MEALS, the brass tack moments at the center of the entire endeavor. I’ve sat at a kitchen table in an uncomfortable suit surrounded by cousins, on the floor cross legged in a college apartment with a paper plate, at a San Francisco dive bar with absolute strangers and as a guest in a strip mall Chinese restaurant, and none of the food was exactly the same, but ALL of these were absolutely HOLIDAYS. It isn’t even necessarily what you eat, it’s that you’re eating it at that time with those people.
A very, very wise man once said, “Take a picture…it’ll last longer.”, but unlike practically everything else in the modern world, the holiday meal must be experienced LIVE; moments impossible to duplicate or store, temporal check points that are reassuringly analog. Besides, my best holiday memories are the least fancy; laughter and wine in water glasses and not nearly enough napkins. It’s probably pretty lucky we didn’t take those pictures after all.
Happy Mealtime.