Holidays

Spending your holidays on the farm. It hasn't always been fun, as the pics of Lewis W. Hine show. 

I don’t know how you feel like at this moment, but I look forward to the holidays. It is not specifically the low temperatures, because combined with clear blue skies and a wintery sun, I really love it. It is just that it seems like everyone is getting ready for Christmas and so should I. With only a week of work left, I thought I might as well dedicate a blog to the topic.

What holidays have to do with food? A lot. Starting with the Christmas holidays, which usually are centered around food as most of us enjoy big Christmas breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Even though the main reason for this break is a religious one, however forgotten by many that let themselves overwhelm by commercial and eating activities. Actually not something I really look forward to. In unlucky cases, you go from one family to another, the host insisting you to eat well. Do they not understand that eating too much three times a day isn’t healthy anymore? At some point you start to feel like a goose which liver will become foie gras in the very near future.

Anyways, I will try not to overeat myself, prepare some less unhealthy dishes as well and hope to be able to do some exercises, to digest everything and get some air. After Christmas follows New Year with the traditional dishes (sweet deepfried dough-balls in the Netherlands, grapes in Spain, lentils in Italy) and Epiphany, in many countries another reason to sit around the table and eat. From where do we actually get all the food?

Well, here is the connection between food and holidays I wanted to talk about. Have you ever realized why children can stay away from school almost all summer? Off-course this has to do with the heat, which makes it impossible to keep the kids concentrated for long. Besides that, the long holidays have to do with a very old profession: the farmer.

Many of our ancestors where farmers, even though it is difficult to imagine now. They were hired by a landlord which made them grow food. U

sually for his staff, his army or the citizens of the village or town he reigned and some for the farmers family. It was an insecure life as it was not possible to avoid diseases in crops and animals, and weather circumstances could never be controlled. As there were no machines, everything had to be done by hand. And this is where the holidays are explained.

When farmers kids where lucky enough to go to school, their parents did not refrain from keeping them home every now and then. The kids who were old enough to help on the land became workers at times of seeding and harvest. You might understand when this was about to happen.

At the moment most of us are so lucky that during the weeks we are not expected at school or in the office, we can really take a break, forget about the daily rhythms and do what we feel like to do. I hope you enjoy it. See you back in the next year.

After you enjoyed some good food, I hope.