Rod Dreher: October 2009 Archives

Julie took Matthew and Lucas to join all the other arty-nerd families of Dallas this afternoon at a They Might Be Giants all-ages show, to which kids were invited to come in costume. Lucas costumed as Karate Guy With a Lightsaber (because Matthew's old karate gi is black, and not quite suited for Jedis), and Matthew chose to go as Expendable Red-Shirt U.S.S. Enterprise Crewman. (Neither his mother nor his father knew what he was talking about at first when he asked for this costume; our nerd licenses should be revoked).

I stayed home with Nora and cooked a beef bourguignon, Regina Charbonneau's pork roast in cane syrup gravy, and this insane recipe for candied bacon (dredge sliced bacon in brown sugar, place on cookie sheet in 400 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, eat when cool, die of pleasure). So, three of us may have had a They Might Be Giants Halloween, but in my heart, I will be having a Jan Terri Halloween. You can too. Click on this video, and enjoy three minutes of bliss.

I just got off the phone with Regina Charbonneau down at Twin Oaks Bed & Breakfast in Natchez. I'd phoned her because she wrote this great piece on the Atlantic's Food Channel about making cane syrup in the South. I wanted to find out when Judge Bramlette's syrup making Saturday was going to be this fall. Anyway, because Natchez is only an hour north of St. Francisville, my Louisiana hometown, we share a lot in common, especially the experience of shocking Yankees and other non-Southerners by showing them that the crazy, only-in-a-novel stories that we've told them really are true. As my wife will tell you, "I thought he was a pathological liar until he took me down there and I met the people he had told me about. It was all true! They really are like that."

Turns out Regina and I know a couple of the same people, but she doesn't know David and Edie Varnado of Camp Topisaw, the Mississippi folks who hand-craft superlative soaps and candles. I never recommend any products on this blog that I don't use myself and believe in, so I can tell you that you can't go wrong ordering from Camp Topisaw.

Regina has a Southern food blog on the Atlantic's Food Channel. If you get around to making her cornbread pudding stuffed with mustard greens recipe before I do, you've got to tell me how it turned out. Here she weighs in on the sweet cornbread vs. savory cornbread controversy. Excerpt:

Cornbread in the South is about as controversial as gumbo. Everyone has a recipe and everyone has an opinion. I love cornbread, so I like both savory and sweet. I also like honey butter on my savory corn bread and jalapeno corn bread, andouille and crawfish cornbread, broccoli and cheese cornbread, cracklin' cornbread, sun dried tomato and bacon cornbread, and I especially like my recipe for cornbread pudding stuffed with mustard greens. When it comes to making cornbread dressing, there is no question you have to use savory cornbread. The one thing I do that is a little different and adds a touch of sweetness and helps the texture is add creamed corn to my cornbread batter. I like the texture and taste of sweet corn in the cornbread and dressing. I add heavy cream and eggs to create a custard texture that I like in a dressing.

I am pleased to report that Regina's recipe is mostly on the side of the angels -- the savory tribe -- in this dispute.

Frustrating story in the NYT today about how small toymakers are being crushed by new federal safety regulations imposed in the wake of poisonous toys from China. Excerpt:

For 35 years, William John Woods has made wooden toys for children. Each one of the 2,000 or so he makes each year passes through his hands at his shop in Ogunquit, Maine, and no child, he said, has ever been hurt by one of his small boats, cars, helicopters or rattles.

But now he and others like him -- makers of small toys and owners of toy resale shops and boutique stores -- say their livelihood is being threatened by federal legislation enacted in the last year to protect children from toxic toys through more extensive testing. Big toymakers, including those whose tainted imports from China led to the recall of 45 million toys and spurred Congress to take action, have more resources and are able to comply with the new law's requirements.

"This is absurd," said Mr. Woods, whose toys are made of maple, walnut and cherry and finished with walnut oil and beeswax from a local apiary. He estimates it would cost him $30,000 -- a figure he calculated from having to pay $400 in required tests for each of the 80 or so different items he produces -- to show that they are not toxic.

"I use beeswax," Mr. Woods said. "The law was targeted at large toymakers using lead. There was no exclusion for benign products."

These homegrown toymakers are banding together to portray themselves as victims of bureaucrats and consumer advocates, and have started letter-writing campaigns to Congress.

Visit the website of the Handmade Toy Alliance to learn what you can do to help. You can't really blame the government for trying to do something to protect the public from the dangers of lead paint-coated toys from China. But this is a classic example of small producers who do things right having to pay for the sins of the megaproducers who only care about cheapness. Small farmers and food artisans suffer from the same bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all mentality, in which trying to address serious health problems caused by mass production has a potentially catastrophic effect on small producers who aren't causing problems in the first place.

Why not offer an exemption for small domestic manufacturers like William John Woods? Require them to put a sticker or something on their toys warning consumers that these products have not been tested under the government regulations, and then let consumers decide if they want to take their chances with these products. Maybe you have a better idea. Let's hear it.

I don't like Halloween, and keep the observances in our family to a minimum. But I'd love to celebrate it with Sally Thomas, who writes in First Things about what she does for the holiday with her kids. Excerpt:

I don't especially encourage my children to dress as scary things for Halloween. We are taught, rightly, to avoid flirting with the occult, and the darkest character any child of mine has ever wanted to be is Darth Vader. This year three of my children are going as characters from the Lord of the Rings books, while my teenager has decided to be Lucille Ball. Christian children need not, as some do, dress as saints for Halloween to "redeem" it. There is something right, I think, in acknowledging on Halloween that the day for the saints has not arrived yet. This is salvation history, after all. We are saved from something--even if only from the ordinary, secular world of I Love Lucy, in which the sun rises and sets on Lucy's dream of being in Ricky's show.

What their costumes are is less important than the fact that, for a night, my children will be people other than themselves: each of them will be someone who, regardless of real-life fears about the dark, is not afraid to step out into the night. Armored inside their personae, they can laugh at the shadows, as well they should. On the one hand, the powers of darkness are no joke; on the other hand, although Christians have no traffic with these powers, we do not fear them.

On All Saints' Day, our parish holds a children's festival, hugely attended, at which children and adults alike dress as their favorite saints. This year mine will be St. Ursula, St. Walburga, St. Gerard Majella, and St. George. I probably will reprise my last year's appearance as St. Helena, although the True Cross did keep whacking people every time I turned around. The party is such fun that we could almost dispense with Halloween, whose festivities, as we observe them, are minimal by comparison. But the cumulative iconography of being, first, a secular character confronting darkness, and then a saint in light, is imaginatively powerful and valuable.

As our Hallowmas ends, the pageantry and excitement of Halloween and All Saints' Day give way to the comparative quiet of the feast of All Souls. This final solemnity is a day without costumes. Having been denizens of the night and citizens of the household of God, the children step back into themselves to contemplate their own mortality and pray for our beloved dead. In three days they have enacted the story of their own eternal lives: from darkness to the hope of heaven and the joy of the saints who await them in glory. From mystery to mystery, it's a drama I would not have them miss.

James Fallows has more than you could possibly want to know about the comparisons between the Kindle and the Nook (which hasn't yet been released!). I don't own an e-reader, and don't expect to buy one. I'm old-fashioned about books -- I like 'em like I like my newspaper: on dead tree -- but that's not why I don't expect to buy an e-reader. The Kindle is a wonderful device, but I find the screen unpleasant to read. If the Nook can create a reading surface that's easier on the eyes, I'll consider buying it.

How about you? Are you a Kindler? Do you like it? What don't you like about it? If you don't use an e-reader, what would it take to get you to buy one (assuming you had the money)?