Anne Bramley

Why do we crave food to bless a union, lavish a birth, or bury the dead? Why toast the future and savor the past? Why do we use bread and bones and salt and wine to tell the stories of ourselves and our people that cannot possibly be told in any other way? Because we like to give meaning to our food, and food to our meaning. Ask any anthropologist — humans like ritual. Food and ritual are bound together like birthday and cake, Easter and egg, or even breakfast and bed.

The comic essayist David Sedaris perfectly captures the absurdity of ritual in his famous French-class skit. Sedaris, an American, attempts to describe in broken French how “the rabbit of Easter … he bring of the chocolate … he come in the night when one sleep on a bed.” His Polish and Italian classmates scoff at the idea of a small, long-eared mammal that sneaks into children’s homes each spring to lavish them with sweets.

The world is changing. This isn’t just an understatement about politics. It’s a truism about the equinox, that sliver of time when one season becomes another, when we exhale the old life and breathe in the new. Some of us free our houses from every last crumb for Passover. Some fill it with Peeps for Easter. Plenty use spring to make a fresh start, and for others still it’s a whole new (Persian) year. I am cleaning the winter out of my freezer. I have bones to pick.

If you want to be young again, take a snow day. Like hiding a tooth under your pillow in an optimistic barter with a fairy, snow days are the rituals that make childhood magical. But unlike baby teeth for midnight swapsies, no matter how old you get, snow keeps coming. And it comes with little warning, which is exactly what makes it so thrilling.

For 19 years I had a Thanksgiving much like any other. In my grandmother’s basement, we layered tablecloths across the ping-pong table, the only thing big enough to bring together the 20-plus of a big extended family. After parades and football, we lined up to pile the meal onto melmac plates. A “simple meal,” Rachel Laudan calls it, designed for a “national celebration embracing all citizens” (and plenty who aren’t). That is, the one bird who feeds the many.

I come from a long line of Missouri farmers. Our roots were literally in the soil for generations. That is, until my Grandma Dot got fed up with wearing feed sack dresses and growing her own food, getting by on what you could and being reluctantly grateful for the Ball jars still left in the root cellar come February. In the mid-century promise of modernity just after WWII, she packed her bag and took a train to St.