As I said, nothing special to look at, it had a pretty good taste but Tim and I both felt that it could be a bit sweeter and I wonder if that doesn't come from our years of eating processed bread, which is sweeter to the taste. I think that I will sweeten it up the next time around but just a tad bit.
But I digress...while I worked out the mechanics of making a loaf of bread again I discovered just how relaxing it was to have to take a moment and actually bake something of substance. I love to bake and it was something that my grandmother encouraged because, as she said, when she was gone, someone needed to be able to bake a decent apple pie for the holidays. Mission accomplished gram!
Whenever those special times of year come around you know that food always plays a HUGE part of it. Each and every sabbat Pagans celebrate have a food component to it, either formally or informally. For example, the current sabbat, Lammas, celebrates the first harvest. If we were still an agrarian society, we would start bringing in our bounty from the fields, slaughtering the first bunch of animals to get us through the soon to be, fall and winter and some of the spring. We are entering the dark of the year and we have to make sure that there were sufficient stores to get us through. If we didn't have enough put up in stores, we starved...never a good thing.
More importantly is the sense of community and home one gets from these particular tasks. If you have ever been in a house where someone has baked a loaf of bread or fresh cookies you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. How can you be pissed off when you walk in to a house that has those scents lingering in the air? you can't! You walk in and BAM! those scents hit you and bring a smile to your face...instantly. Scents also trigger memory centers in our brain as well. I can't make an apple pie without thinking of my grandmother and all the wonderful times I spent helping her bake stuff for a family event.
Harvest festivals create a sense of community as well. It was hard work bringing in the harvest and communities banded together in order to get the grains from the field to the barn as quickly as possible since the slightest delay could ruin an entire crop or leave it exposed to the elements, ruining it and leaving a family to starve. It was also no easy thing to gather the animals and bring them from their summer forage areas and make ready for slaughtering and preserving them. In case you didn't know...cows are HUGE! and given that our ancestors wasted no part of an animal either. To do so dishonored the spirit of the animal who had just given its life so that you could continue yours.
Each and every sabbat in the wheel of the year has a food component to it but its more important to see that each sabbat has a hospitality component to it as well. The sabbats were not only meant to be celebrated but they were meant to be celebrated as a family and as a community. It was some of the few times that the opening of the household stores were to be done with a sense of graciousness and unselfishness towards your neighbors. Everyone brought something, in accordance with their ability to do so and if they couldn't, it didn't matter because there was always enough to go around.
It would do us well to remember that the holidays we celebrate aren't just about what we can put on the altar as offerings but what we can offer our families and neighbors in terms of gracious hospitality and unselfish giving to those in need.
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