Jello Salad and Hamburgers

I truly believe it would be difficult for anyone to find any culture on this planet that didn't associate festivities with food. America is no exception and my family isn't either. There exist two food-associated traditions in my immediate family that would be profoundly missed if they were no longer present on our celebratory family table.

The first dish is the all-American Jello salad. I suppose it is not a traditional Jello salad that most Americans are used to; my mother always simply makes it by layering red and green jello with some sort of lemony cream concoction (the recipe has yet to be passed on to the next generation). However, the custom of its presence at major holidays is the same as in other families. I genuinely cannot remember a Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter when this layered, tri-colored, fruit-filled "delicacy" wasn't always there next to the mashed potatoes and turkey. No one takes more than a small spoonful, but to look down at the table and not see this colorful dish would just be wrong. It would make our holiday celebrations incomplete. For a dish that is never desired or even thought about at any other time of the year, it's amusing to think about the uproar its absence would cause in our family. For us, this tradition seems to bring comfort and familiarity that no other food really does.

The second food-related tradition in our family is the special meal that is made for every child by our mother on our birthdays. For my special day my mom has been serving hamburgers, baked beans, and pumpkin pie since I was seven years old. I really have no idea why a seven-year old would request something like pumpkin pie instead of the more common birthday cake, but I did, and just like Jello salad on holidays, its nonappearance at my birthday celebration would leave a void in the day. I certainly wouldn't say that hamburgers, baked beans and pumpkin pie is currently my favorite meal, but I just couldn't imagine a birthday without it. It is so ingrained in my idea of what makes my birthday special that to not have this meal waiting for me would make me really quite sad. As ridiculously self-absorbed as this sounds, I would feel so upset that a tradition that is completely and totally associated with me had been discarded.

Food makes me happy, but not in the unhealthy I-need-to-eat-to-fill-a-void kind of way. Like I mentioned before, all cultures use food as a tool for bringing people together. Food can be so familiar that removing it from a celebration takes away something that absolutely cannot be filled by anything else. Food can make people feel special, can represent a culture, can be a comfort. There is really nothing else like it.