Shopping, it can be a zoo. We have two major supermarket chains and a local natural food store. And there are one or two rinky-dink places where you may need to sanitize anything bought there. We live in a reasonably cosmopolitan area, so why can’t I find pasta de guava or halvah? Searching for poppyseed for Grandma’s poppyseed bread made me feel like the protagonist in an adventure movie, not a shopper.
Those three things are on my shopping list every year around this time. They are part of my holiday history. My German-Hungarian grandmother made her poppyseed bread, The halvah, a central European/ Near Eastern treat made from sesame, and the guava paste a bit of the Caribean. There were other things as well, but those are the ones that I regularly have difficulty getting.
Frankly, I think it reprehensible that today I’ll travel most of an hour to the nearest Whole Foods ( warmly referred to as Whole Paycheck by many of us) in my search for the “holy Grail” of holiday condiments. Typically, it’s not what I’d do. But Christmas was the biggest holiday in my family, and one of my goals has been to inspire my children to love family traditions.
I want my family to recall and emulate some of the traditions on their own at some future point. Every year at this point, my mother is counseling me not to group the ornaments too closely. Or that my grandmother is watching me make the poppyseed bread. My father is slicing the halvah while he talks to my Uncle Lenny, or Uncle Joe is sorting through the Christmas music for a favorite album.
In a world that abandons traditions as rapidly as it creates new distractions, I want my family to be anchored in an intimate sense of who we are.
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Nice post ✉️
I can just imagine your acting hunting for poppyseeds.
I found the Halva at whole paycheck, and the poppeyseed at a natural footsore. But the Hungarian brand in a blue tin Grandma liked I can never find.