Good evening, Kibitzers! Welcome to the Samhain edition of Kitchen Table Kibitzing, where we are also marking the related holiday, Halloween, and the related-only-in-our-minds holiday, the birthday of our friend Glen The Plumber. In the interest of efficiency, I will be brazenly recycling big hunks of my Oct. 31, 2013 KTK diary, including the preceding sentence!
Since we’re packing several holidays into one diary, there will be birthday cake below to serve as treats. Internet cake is entirely free of sugar, fat, gluten, and allergens of any kind, and is organic, vegan, cruelty-free, and dolphin-safe (and is also whatever flavor you like best). So help yourself!
* Did you know you can put a link in a picture caption, except not in the title image's caption? I didn't. I fully expected it to embed there, but instead, inelegantly, here’s the full text of the poem Samhain, by Annie Finch.
Seasonal musical selection:
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For Wiccans and some other Pagans, Samhain (say sah-wen -- think of the "mh" as "w") is the start of a new year, the end of the harvest and the onset of the dark and contemplative time of year. It's also a time to remember people who have passed on. The traditional belief that the "veil between worlds" is thin on this night is the likely origin of the association of ghosts with this, the eve of the Christian holiday All Hallows Day, whose name got shortened from All Hallows Eve to Hallowe'en. However, the intent of the aforesaid pagans on this day is to honor the dead rather than to tell scary stories.
There's plenty of discussion (much of it visible at the impending link) about the connection between the old Celtic Samhain and the Christian All Saints Day and All Souls Day, and between those and modern observances of Halloween. There's a suggestion that people fearing retribution disguised themselves as a way of hiding out from vengeful souls on the prowl. Roll in the custom of children going house to house begging for "soul cakes" in exchange for their prayers for the dead, and you end up with trick-or-treating!
Vegetable illumination note: in Ireland and Scotland, the traditional vegetable to carve and use for a lantern is a turnip or rutabaga. Immigrants to the Americas switched to the native pumpkin, which I'd guess is much easier to hollow out. I speak as one who has never tried to core a rutabaga, however (Martha Stewart says to use a melon-ball scoop). I understand glescagal has experience with this form of jack o’ lantern, so perhaps she has tips for the hopeful turnip-carver. (Excellent examples shown at those first two links!)
Okay, here’s the birthday part: A very happy birthday, and many, many more, to our dear Glen The Plumber! He’s a true friend and ally, a very good human, and a tireless fighter against the political Forces of Darkness. Hugs to you and all your beautiful family, Glen!
About the cake at left: MANY are the novelty cakes for plumbers to be found on the internet. But in sincere hope that there won't be many (or any!) more Octobers in the Trump "Administration", I'm going with the Golden Toilet cake this time.
As for the edible looking cake:
I have one more Halloween treat for you, I think. I am writing on Sunday night, when no indictments have yet been unsealed, and the shit and the fan are on a collision course but haven’t met yet. So as I write, this scary little ghost story is still funny. I’m only too well aware that there's potential for so much weirding that I’ll feel like removing it by publication time, but we'll see.
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Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by and tell us about your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper. Newcomers may notice that many who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well. |