The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Turn a mealtime rut into a ritual
Celebrate the power of everyday things, author says.
How many rituals do you have in a year?
Maybe you eat fish stew on Christmas Eve and blackeyed peas on New Year’s, and make sure your holiday thank you cards are written by the Super Bowl and that your sister gets a card in the mail for her birthday.
What about how you make your coffee or put your kids to bed? What about where you get breakfast tacos on Friday mornings or the special bakery where you like to get a nice loaf of bread for the weekend?
Jenny Rosenstrach us to appreciate the everyday rituals in our lives.
Rosenstrach, as the writer behind a website and book called “Dinner: A Love Story,” is perhaps the biggest champion for making dinnertime the most important daily ritual, but in her new book, “How to Celebrate Everything: Recipes and Rituals for Birthdays, Holidays, Family Dinners, and Every Day In Between” (Ballantine, $30), she advocates readers to employ that same intentionality to so many other moments in life, too.
Rosenstrach says that most of us are aware of the traditions and rituals around the big holidays, but we often have smaller, day-to-day rituals that might not seem worth celebrating. How you make your oatmeal. The specific route you take to work. The doughnuts you buy for your coworkers’ birthdays or the goodnight song you sing your kids.
Don’t call it a rut; call it a ritual.
“Every day is a race to the finish line, and I don’t want days to feel like that,” she says. “The rituals you create with your family can infuse your life with meaning, every day.”
Her own kids, ages 13 and 14, are going to be out of the house soon enough, so she wants to slow down and appreciate her time with them. “There’s no way to solve the time-going-toofast problem,” she says, “but rituals shine a spotlight on the moments that are memorable.” In the Rosenstrach household, where her teenage daughters are not allowed to eat dinner in front of the TV, Rosenstrach recently added an exception: They may eat there on the night of big broadcast events, such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars.
It’s a small shift to acknowledge this as a new family ritual, but it infuses the act with more consciousness and appreciation. She takes notes after big family dinners to record the details of the day. They eat their great-grandma’s meatballs so often that her recipe now graces the inside of the kitchen cabinet, almost as a piece of art, an homage to that particular tradition.
When she and her family go on vacation, they always buy Pop-Tarts. “We don’t get Pop-Tarts in our everyday lives,” she says. “Now, as soon as we get to the place we are going, the kids say, ‘We gotta go get the PopTarts.’”
Adding rituals around recurring activities that you don’t love to do can give you something to look forward to. “Every year, my husband is maniacal about taking down the Christmas tree on New Year’s Day. We dread it so much because it means the holiday is over, but this year, I’m going to make a cake and we’re going to try to make it into an occasion,” she says.
Another wintertime tradition comes from Rosenstrach’s childhood when she and the rest of her family would write letters to themselves to pack into the box of holiday decorations. The next holiday season, you’d get to read your letter to yourself. You could extend this idea far beyond a year: A friend recently solicited letters for her toddler’s birthday that they plan to give her when she’s 18. Those letters are proof that the rituals that don’t cost anything often bring the biggest returns.