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Food Fosters Faith Research Paper

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Food Fosters Faith

For as long as I can remember, there used to be a tradition amongst the women and children of my extended maternal family where we would gather on no specific date during Advent more than ten days before Christmas. The purpose of our gathering was to prepare and bake an abundance of cookies for each family’s household to last during the Christmas holiday, to be brought to church events and to friends as a Christmas offering. The event used to be called Cookie Day and used to take place at my family’s home in the kitchen, in the living and in the dining room. After twelve hours of preparation, baking and cleaning, hundreds of cookies would be divided to go home with ten families. Cookie Day fostered a harmonious environment …show more content…

The logistics of the preparation, the chosen recipes, the delegation, and the organization of this affair mirrored our involvement in our churches. The psychological immersion began before we even gathered. The day before Cookie Day each of my aunts, my grandmother and even my cousin’s grandmother would work on the phone to assure the assignment of each desired recipe and food item to each member. Aunt Cindy always made the oatmeal raisin cookies and Linzer cookies, Aunt Dana always made the thumbprints and peanut butter kiss cookies, Aunt Sherry, the gingerbread, Aunt Monica, the chocolate chip, my grandmother, the almond Spritz cookies, and my mother made Italian ricotta cookies. Aunt Colleen made the sugar cookie dough in advance so that the dough had time to chill and on Cookie Day she sat with the children at the living room table and helped us cut and decorate our cookies. My mother always bought the foundational food items like the flour, the sugar, the butter, and the baking soda, and depending on their assigned recipes, everyone brought what they needed. Though my grandmother always arrived the earliest with extra mixing bowls, baking sheets, and electronic mixers, my mother had the leading role given that she was host. She managed …show more content…

My mother bake with her friends and no longer goes to church while my aunts bake only with their children and still go to Sunday mass. My family stopped going to church and then when I left home for college, my mother stopped hosting Cookie Day, but no one continued the tradition. My mother and her friends began a new tradition, the Cookie Party. Everyone still observes Christmas and everyone still loves cookies, so why did Cookie Day end? Why did Cookie Day commensality dissipate? For my mother, the association between food and faith still exists. Now she identifies with Italian foodways and she and her friends now drink heavy bodied red wine while they bake an abundance of cookies, snack on Pecorino cheese, and involve their husbands. After baking and drinking their husbands cook together two types of pasta dinners (Giorgio and shrimp scampi); both the men and the women feed and are fed. My mother finds her faith through food and friends, but food reveals itself as the main instrument for connecting people in this narrative. Though the Cookie Party evolved from religious intentions, the event of baking cookies became holy for its’ purpose in brining together those with similar beliefs and attitudes about life itself. Last December, my mother and her friends gave the extra cookies to

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