One thing that comes to mind is the renaming of objects that tends to happen with families: for example, in my family we call clementines and mandarins "tasties" because one day my little brother was struggling to peel one and yelled out "Open up, TASTY!"
Another example of something that has become imbued with meaning for me is something I refer to as "the family pile." My family lives overseas so we tend to see each other for a 3-4 week trip once per year. Throughout the year, there is a shelf in my apartment dedicated to next year's trip. Some of the things it holds are socks left behind from a previous visit, a box from a chocolate shop that gives you a discount for returning them, and souvenirs from various trips. When I left my parents' house this year to visit my maternal grandparents, I also took my mom's pile to my grandparents, and came back to my parents with stacks of magazines, cookies, and more that they had saved for my mom. The family pile is a reminder of a lot of things: that there will always be a next visit, and that we still rely on each other for material help even when living far apart.
Naming one’s car is not unusual. Naming it for its affable ugliness might be.
The most reliable car I’ve owned was named Lonesome George, after the Pinta Island tortoise of the Galapagos. Lonesome was an old Toyota a mechanic we knew had refurbished, so that it ran well, but its defective dark-green paint, which had worn to a dull, pitted desert patina after just a few years in a non-desert climate, had not been refurbished, making Lonesome resemble a tortoise — and making him really inexpensive for his reliability. Sadly, our Lonesome eventually gave up the ghost, about a decade after the real Lonesome George did. But our Lonesome had a good run, and I don’t know if I can get as attached to a nicer-looking car.
I’ve also run across more than one person with EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) who humorously names problem body parts. Arguably, no treatment for EDS works as well as relentless bodily discipline — but no treatment for EDS, including relentless bodily discipline, works all that well. We all know (or should know) that we can’t control other people, and that even people who really annoy us are still people, with human dignity and so on. But remembering that our own bodies have dignity, as well as limits we can’t reasonably be expected to control, in the midst of bodily dysfunction can be harder.
“I call this knee Karen because she’s always complaining, and that one Jennifer because she’s such a spoiled princess,” doesn’t sound very affectionate — or fair to the Karens and Jennifers of the world — but it’s more affectionate than what we might be thinking about our lemon knees without the nicknames. A name, even one of contemptuous stereotype, confers some independence to a thing, acknowledging it’s not just some cypher for our domination — no matter how much others, however well-meaning, expect us to dominate our bodily problems as if they were cyphers.
Our family has Lake House Chicken, a chicken cooked on skewers with a marinade made with lemon, soy, Worcester sauce, honey, garlic powder, and onion powder, and salt.... all ingredients which happened to be in the fridge and pantry and with which I improvised a dinner when we were vacationing in Maine at the lake. It's a decent enough recipe, but I suspect we have it more often in summer than we would otherwise precisely because of the name, which reminds us of our family vacations.
I really love your example for "storge" of the particular tree on the corner that you love. I've always had a fond relationship with particular trees wherever I've lived. Also with particular houses that I admire as I'm walking through my neighborhood. I've always felt "storge" was a bit abstract, but you've made it something I can grasp.
I have a deep storge for a giant yellow Tupperware bowl because every Christmas it sat on the bottom shelf of my grandmother's refrigerator, full of her special cranberry salad (equal parts ground fresh cranberries, granny Smith apples, and granulated sugar). Now every year I make her salad and put it in the big yellow bowl my own refrigerator.
The family ritual is mashed potatoes, always to be served in the original stoneware bowl, c. 1835, a wedding present. Every Thanksgiving at home it was there. And now that it is ours, every Thanksgiving it is there on our table too.
Now that I’m a mom of several school-age kids (including preschool), I find I like Valentine’s Day more because it’s a chance for my kids to thank classmates simply for being classmates with candy and a bad pun — to show storge.
Oh, there’s still a lot to hate, since the work of ensuring kids pack treats for every classmate realistically falls on the parents.
Last night, I found myself shouting at all my kids, “Will somebody *please* return the X-acto knife cap before I turn Sweeney Todd?!!”
Our printer had broken, ruling out modern mass-production of greetings, so I turned to carving a simple stencil with my swivel X-acto, which promptly broke, too, leaving me with just plain X-acto, and anyone should fear leaving an X-acto knife out around my kids. As soon I finished the stencil, I desperately needed the cap to put the knife away.
True love wipes either end of a person at either end of life. The fancier loves, eros, agape, can help with that, but most end-wiping comes from storge. Good stuff.
These are themes I am often wrestling with. I've been focused specifically on manifesting feast days in meaningful ways. In my experience the family celebration is generally insufficient. If the feast day is culturally obscure, it's necessary to form a body, a party, which extends beyond the family if we hope to make it real/manifest. This is also why kids want a party for their birthday and don't find a traditional dish with their family sufficient or meaningful celebration. The family celebration only matters where the holiday itself has enough cultural relevance to already be grounded. The particulars of how we celebrate Christmas are meaningful because Christmas is a real thing. It is not obscure but well established. Meanwhile, a family celebration of the annunciation amounts to very little in the absence of a larger body/party/celebration...feast.
I like this idea that relationships based on merit are fragile.
There is a kind of biscuit I make with some herbs, pepper, and Romano cheese, to go with a particular soup. When my oldest's friend was having dinner with us one night, he commented that the biscuits were "kind of bourgeois." They've been bourgeois biscuits ever since, which always reminds me of that great kid. We have many things like that, some of them quite dopey, but that's the one that pops to mind. (Oh, the really dopey one is mommy soup, which is just tomato-basil soup with couscous, but nobody can be bothered to say 'tomato-basil soup with couscous' so the dumb name sticks despite being quite embarrassing.)
Thanks for the shout out here! I'm honored to be included here. Also, such a great line: "If every loving relationship is a meritocratic relationship, it is necessarily fragile."
I have been harping to my friends and family for a while now that bonds of affection are weak, but I think this is a better way to put it. I know I sometimes have sort of a relationship leaderboard in my heads and at least for me I've found that it makes it harder to maintain those relationships during rougher patches. Anyway, so much to think about.
“Sweet Jane’s Cornbread Dressing” is a dish my stepmom made for Thanksgiving and Christmas. After college, I asked for and received gave the recipe from her in her handwriting. It reminds me of her every time I make it; she passed away from breast cancer back in June ‘10 after being my stepmom for nearly 30 yrs.
Semi related, Dixie Lane recommends celebrating family feast days so you can do it the way you want to. With Christmas, etc, you have obligations to others and societal traditions and things so you can't really go your own way as much as maybe you want to - but with a family feast day, you can make it yours.
Fifteen years ago, when my parents remade their kitchen, my mother made a big wooden board with the names of all the dishes which were regularly made in our family ("regularly" being a wish more than a fact in many case). Quite a few of those dishes have names. Sometimes it relates to the place the dish was learned ("soupe irlandaise/Irish soup"). "Poulet libanais" (Lebanese chicken) is a reinterpretation of a dish a Lebanese friend of my mother did once, 30 years ago (this is definitely cultural appropriation, but delicious enough to be forgiven). Other dishes are under the name of my grandmother (Tomates farcies comme à Barbazan/stuffed tomatoes like in Barbazan), or an aunt (Martine's gaspacho), or our cleaning lady (Omel's couscous). The birth village of my grandfather appears twice ("foie gras d'Espaon" and "Poulet d'Espaon", (Espaon's chicken)*.
There are also "Dad's fried eggs" (the only dish he used to make), and "œuf cocotte au bacon of Stella" (my sister) and "Desert Rose of Clément" (myself). Those were clearly intended as an encouragement (and it worked : my sister and I became good cooks, and my father has added wienerschnitzel to his arsenal). My mother, obviously, is not named : she was the one doing the cooking.
And most importantly, there is the "gâteau de tante Freddy" (Aunt Freddy's cake). Freddy was the wife of a cousin of my grandmother. I've no memory of her, except for this cake which is religiously baked twice a year for birthdays. It's one of my most treasured heritage.
*Espaon's chicken are not like any other chicken. It may as well be an other species. For starter, they are like four time as heavy as commercial chicken.
Your questions here remind me of an e-newsletter (now on hiatus, I think) called Good Question, which had an edition where the writer put out a call for "family slang," a term or usage that would be unintelligible to someone else, but which in your family has an established, in-joke sort of meaning. Her example was her family's term "ceramic sheep," for a gift you "give someone else," but in some ways it's really for you. Besides sharing one of my own family's slang terms ("mildew," which can function as an answer to "What are you doing [or 'what did you do'] today?" if everything is/was too boringly commonplace to detail), in my own thoughts I now use the writer's.
Our most unusual marking of time is how we note not just the birthday of our twins but the day I was admitted to the hospital with premature rupture of membranes (3 days before their birth at 34.5 weeks) and the day they came home (9 days after birth). I know they will accept these only as facts of their lives for a long time yet, but someday when they have children of their own they may see them differently. Similarly, the word "twiblings" has entered our familect (such a great word!) as a way to describe the unique aspects of a relationship between twins, particularly identical twins like ours. It attempts to explain how they are both each other's staunchest defender AND deepest rival, usually within a span of a few minutes 😵💫😉
Leah when are you coming to MN? I saw you mentioned it in your last post but I couldn't find a date. I would love to hear you speak!
One thing that comes to mind is the renaming of objects that tends to happen with families: for example, in my family we call clementines and mandarins "tasties" because one day my little brother was struggling to peel one and yelled out "Open up, TASTY!"
Another example of something that has become imbued with meaning for me is something I refer to as "the family pile." My family lives overseas so we tend to see each other for a 3-4 week trip once per year. Throughout the year, there is a shelf in my apartment dedicated to next year's trip. Some of the things it holds are socks left behind from a previous visit, a box from a chocolate shop that gives you a discount for returning them, and souvenirs from various trips. When I left my parents' house this year to visit my maternal grandparents, I also took my mom's pile to my grandparents, and came back to my parents with stacks of magazines, cookies, and more that they had saved for my mom. The family pile is a reminder of a lot of things: that there will always be a next visit, and that we still rely on each other for material help even when living far apart.
Naming one’s car is not unusual. Naming it for its affable ugliness might be.
The most reliable car I’ve owned was named Lonesome George, after the Pinta Island tortoise of the Galapagos. Lonesome was an old Toyota a mechanic we knew had refurbished, so that it ran well, but its defective dark-green paint, which had worn to a dull, pitted desert patina after just a few years in a non-desert climate, had not been refurbished, making Lonesome resemble a tortoise — and making him really inexpensive for his reliability. Sadly, our Lonesome eventually gave up the ghost, about a decade after the real Lonesome George did. But our Lonesome had a good run, and I don’t know if I can get as attached to a nicer-looking car.
I’ve also run across more than one person with EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) who humorously names problem body parts. Arguably, no treatment for EDS works as well as relentless bodily discipline — but no treatment for EDS, including relentless bodily discipline, works all that well. We all know (or should know) that we can’t control other people, and that even people who really annoy us are still people, with human dignity and so on. But remembering that our own bodies have dignity, as well as limits we can’t reasonably be expected to control, in the midst of bodily dysfunction can be harder.
“I call this knee Karen because she’s always complaining, and that one Jennifer because she’s such a spoiled princess,” doesn’t sound very affectionate — or fair to the Karens and Jennifers of the world — but it’s more affectionate than what we might be thinking about our lemon knees without the nicknames. A name, even one of contemptuous stereotype, confers some independence to a thing, acknowledging it’s not just some cypher for our domination — no matter how much others, however well-meaning, expect us to dominate our bodily problems as if they were cyphers.
Our family has Lake House Chicken, a chicken cooked on skewers with a marinade made with lemon, soy, Worcester sauce, honey, garlic powder, and onion powder, and salt.... all ingredients which happened to be in the fridge and pantry and with which I improvised a dinner when we were vacationing in Maine at the lake. It's a decent enough recipe, but I suspect we have it more often in summer than we would otherwise precisely because of the name, which reminds us of our family vacations.
I really love your example for "storge" of the particular tree on the corner that you love. I've always had a fond relationship with particular trees wherever I've lived. Also with particular houses that I admire as I'm walking through my neighborhood. I've always felt "storge" was a bit abstract, but you've made it something I can grasp.
I have a deep storge for a giant yellow Tupperware bowl because every Christmas it sat on the bottom shelf of my grandmother's refrigerator, full of her special cranberry salad (equal parts ground fresh cranberries, granny Smith apples, and granulated sugar). Now every year I make her salad and put it in the big yellow bowl my own refrigerator.
The family ritual is mashed potatoes, always to be served in the original stoneware bowl, c. 1835, a wedding present. Every Thanksgiving at home it was there. And now that it is ours, every Thanksgiving it is there on our table too.
Since it’s Valentine’s Eve, I’m returning to add:
Now that I’m a mom of several school-age kids (including preschool), I find I like Valentine’s Day more because it’s a chance for my kids to thank classmates simply for being classmates with candy and a bad pun — to show storge.
Oh, there’s still a lot to hate, since the work of ensuring kids pack treats for every classmate realistically falls on the parents.
Last night, I found myself shouting at all my kids, “Will somebody *please* return the X-acto knife cap before I turn Sweeney Todd?!!”
Our printer had broken, ruling out modern mass-production of greetings, so I turned to carving a simple stencil with my swivel X-acto, which promptly broke, too, leaving me with just plain X-acto, and anyone should fear leaving an X-acto knife out around my kids. As soon I finished the stencil, I desperately needed the cap to put the knife away.
True love wipes either end of a person at either end of life. The fancier loves, eros, agape, can help with that, but most end-wiping comes from storge. Good stuff.
What a fantastic newsletter. Perfect use of the form.
These are themes I am often wrestling with. I've been focused specifically on manifesting feast days in meaningful ways. In my experience the family celebration is generally insufficient. If the feast day is culturally obscure, it's necessary to form a body, a party, which extends beyond the family if we hope to make it real/manifest. This is also why kids want a party for their birthday and don't find a traditional dish with their family sufficient or meaningful celebration. The family celebration only matters where the holiday itself has enough cultural relevance to already be grounded. The particulars of how we celebrate Christmas are meaningful because Christmas is a real thing. It is not obscure but well established. Meanwhile, a family celebration of the annunciation amounts to very little in the absence of a larger body/party/celebration...feast.
I like this idea that relationships based on merit are fragile.
There is a kind of biscuit I make with some herbs, pepper, and Romano cheese, to go with a particular soup. When my oldest's friend was having dinner with us one night, he commented that the biscuits were "kind of bourgeois." They've been bourgeois biscuits ever since, which always reminds me of that great kid. We have many things like that, some of them quite dopey, but that's the one that pops to mind. (Oh, the really dopey one is mommy soup, which is just tomato-basil soup with couscous, but nobody can be bothered to say 'tomato-basil soup with couscous' so the dumb name sticks despite being quite embarrassing.)
Thanks for the shout out here! I'm honored to be included here. Also, such a great line: "If every loving relationship is a meritocratic relationship, it is necessarily fragile."
I have been harping to my friends and family for a while now that bonds of affection are weak, but I think this is a better way to put it. I know I sometimes have sort of a relationship leaderboard in my heads and at least for me I've found that it makes it harder to maintain those relationships during rougher patches. Anyway, so much to think about.
“Sweet Jane’s Cornbread Dressing” is a dish my stepmom made for Thanksgiving and Christmas. After college, I asked for and received gave the recipe from her in her handwriting. It reminds me of her every time I make it; she passed away from breast cancer back in June ‘10 after being my stepmom for nearly 30 yrs.
https://thehollow.substack.com/p/growing-in-joy-through-family-feast
Semi related, Dixie Lane recommends celebrating family feast days so you can do it the way you want to. With Christmas, etc, you have obligations to others and societal traditions and things so you can't really go your own way as much as maybe you want to - but with a family feast day, you can make it yours.
Fifteen years ago, when my parents remade their kitchen, my mother made a big wooden board with the names of all the dishes which were regularly made in our family ("regularly" being a wish more than a fact in many case). Quite a few of those dishes have names. Sometimes it relates to the place the dish was learned ("soupe irlandaise/Irish soup"). "Poulet libanais" (Lebanese chicken) is a reinterpretation of a dish a Lebanese friend of my mother did once, 30 years ago (this is definitely cultural appropriation, but delicious enough to be forgiven). Other dishes are under the name of my grandmother (Tomates farcies comme à Barbazan/stuffed tomatoes like in Barbazan), or an aunt (Martine's gaspacho), or our cleaning lady (Omel's couscous). The birth village of my grandfather appears twice ("foie gras d'Espaon" and "Poulet d'Espaon", (Espaon's chicken)*.
There are also "Dad's fried eggs" (the only dish he used to make), and "œuf cocotte au bacon of Stella" (my sister) and "Desert Rose of Clément" (myself). Those were clearly intended as an encouragement (and it worked : my sister and I became good cooks, and my father has added wienerschnitzel to his arsenal). My mother, obviously, is not named : she was the one doing the cooking.
And most importantly, there is the "gâteau de tante Freddy" (Aunt Freddy's cake). Freddy was the wife of a cousin of my grandmother. I've no memory of her, except for this cake which is religiously baked twice a year for birthdays. It's one of my most treasured heritage.
*Espaon's chicken are not like any other chicken. It may as well be an other species. For starter, they are like four time as heavy as commercial chicken.
Your questions here remind me of an e-newsletter (now on hiatus, I think) called Good Question, which had an edition where the writer put out a call for "family slang," a term or usage that would be unintelligible to someone else, but which in your family has an established, in-joke sort of meaning. Her example was her family's term "ceramic sheep," for a gift you "give someone else," but in some ways it's really for you. Besides sharing one of my own family's slang terms ("mildew," which can function as an answer to "What are you doing [or 'what did you do'] today?" if everything is/was too boringly commonplace to detail), in my own thoughts I now use the writer's.
Our most unusual marking of time is how we note not just the birthday of our twins but the day I was admitted to the hospital with premature rupture of membranes (3 days before their birth at 34.5 weeks) and the day they came home (9 days after birth). I know they will accept these only as facts of their lives for a long time yet, but someday when they have children of their own they may see them differently. Similarly, the word "twiblings" has entered our familect (such a great word!) as a way to describe the unique aspects of a relationship between twins, particularly identical twins like ours. It attempts to explain how they are both each other's staunchest defender AND deepest rival, usually within a span of a few minutes 😵💫😉
Leah when are you coming to MN? I saw you mentioned it in your last post but I couldn't find a date. I would love to hear you speak!