Where’s the Turkey?
by
Imagine this for a minute.
It’s Christmas Day, and dinnertime in the Windsor family home is fast approaching. Tara is busy in the kitchen, the boys are playing hockey in the cul-de-sac, and Lawrence is entertaining the family guests: Pat, Tara’s father, Sarah, Tara’s mother, Ray, Lawrence’s Dad, and Mary, Lawrence’s mother, along with Debbie, Tara’s younger sister. The tree is lit, the fire’s roaring, and the candles on the decorated table are glowing.
Finally Tara calls everyone to the table, and they scurry to their places, hungry. Tara disappears to the kitchen, refusing help with the serving dishes, and returns with vegetables: broccoli, carrots, and beans. However, her next trip to the table stops everyone in mid-sentence for, instead of a steaming, brown turkey, she carries out a giant casserole of macaroni and cheese and places it in the center of the table. After the first moment of surprise, everyone begins to laugh, thinking it was a joke, but the laughter begins to fade when the realization that no, there was going to be no turkey this Christmas, begins to sink in.
After a few moments of stunned silence, Debbie, a vegetarinan, suddenly whoops with delight, “Yessss! No dead birds in this house today!” Everyone else turns and glares at her, and Tara starts bustling about, serving up plates, trying to break the tension…
Food has symbolic meaning. Not all food, of course. Sometimes oatmeal is just, well, oatmeal. Or is it? Oatmeal for a snack? No. Usually we think of oatmeal as breakfast. The start of the day… well, maybe for a health nut, at least!
Well, how about a cookie? Can’t that just be a cookie? Well, for one person it’s a treat. For another it’s a snack. For a little girl whose big brother just got a cookie, demanding she gets a cookie too represents her expectation of equal treatment. For another, eating the cookie symbolizes a slip-up in the quest to lose weight. (Oops.) For the office worker on coffee break with the other “girls,” not eating the cookie flags her as not part of the group, as stand-offish, as a food fanatic or, worse, somehow better than the rest for exercising self-restraint.
Hmm…
I think I’ll just go and start my day with a cup of coffee. Catch you later!
ea/