Cookie Day

[talon]

One of the holiest days for Numenists is fast approaching. Sure, Thanksgiving is an important family holiday - we tend to do family reunions then because it's a guaranteed 4 day weekend that we can all arrange most of the time. But Cookie Day - Cookie Day is the defining holy day for Numenists, exceeding Founder's Day in importance and observation.

Why is Cookie Day such an important holy day for us?

This ties in to our defining concept of the cornucopia, so let's start there.

The concept of the cornucopia is a fairly simple one at its inception: each of us is a vessel. In our case, we imagine it as being a cone- or horn-shaped basket (cornucopia) filled to overflowing with good things. What's inside the cornucopia is ours - our resources, our needs fulfilled, our strengths and skills, and even a few of our wants. What spills out of the cornucopia is our excess. We can choose to keep it, but most of us choose to share it, helping fill the cornucopias of our family, friends, neighbors, and others in need. In dire times, we dig down into our cornucopias to help - but not too far or it hurts us, sometimes mortally. We depend on our family, friends, neighbors and others to refill our depleted cornucopia so we can start generating surpluses ourselves to share around again.

Cookies represent the contents of our cornucopias.

Now that you know about the concept of the cornucopia, let's look at the history of Cookie Day and how it evolved to become so important to us.

As you know, Numenism is a recent religion, founded in 1946 and consciously created. Our Founders guided the original building of Numenism, and in their old age, created a method for Celebrants to become Numenist Elders, charged with guiding the on-going construction of Numenism. Every Celebrant brings to Numenism new concepts and ways of celebrating, and these new concepts and new ways are vetted by the Elder(s), checked for compatibility with our core beliefs, and adapted to meld seamlessly with the existing structure of Numenism. Yes, some of our concepts and methods are inspired by other religions and cultures, but they are not lifted wholesale from them and grafted to Numenism. The Elder(s) look at the reason(s) the concept or method exists, checks to see if something similar already exists in Numenism, if the reason(s) are compatible with Numenism, and if it is something that can be adapted to be Numenist. There are lots of celebrations, reasons for celebrations, and methods and ceremonies and celebrations that just aren't Numenist and can't be made Numenist. There are others so close to what we already are that often, we've already developed something similar. We are all human, after all, and we have the same needs and wants and desires and yearnings, and we often express them in similar ways. There is a lot of spontaneous similarity between religions throughout the world. Some similarities come through exposure and intermarriage, and some were imposed by conquerors. We don't "appropriate" (ie lift whole cloth and call it ours) from other religions, but we do study them and adapt concepts that we are already struggling to express within our religion.

Cookie Day is a celebration we adapted. It wasn't a religious celebration, originally. It was a community celebration, one that had been celebrated for centuries in a remote German village and spread to nearby villages. The way we Numenists celebrate it isn't the same as the original - we've adapted it to comply with Numenism.

In the original celebration, each household would bake the cookies they were best known for, then on a set date (a wedding, for example, or a holiday), would put tables outside piled with their cookies, then they'd take baskets and visit at each table, filling the basket with a variety of cookies to take home. There would be music and dancing and beer and milk, and the eating of many, many cookies. When the village got too large to go from house to house, they moved down to the "village square" - in this case, it was a natural small valley in the village, where the beauty salon, butcher, baker, green grocer, pharmacist, largest pub, and mercantile were located; the land was too wet and rocky for crops, but with stone buildings and streets and drainage, dry enough for businesses so it became the default celebration center of the village - completely paved over and so just right for dancing and partying. The whole point of Cookie Day was to let each family have a variety of delicious cookies while only having to bake one or two of their favorites. Cookie exchanges in America have the same sort of concept. In Philadelphia, weddings often come with a cookie buffet baked by friends and family of the wedding couple and the guests get boxes to take cookies home with them.

And our Founders saw this and was struck by how representative of Numenism it was and incorporated it into Numenism in the early days (sometime in the 60's, not sure of the exact date because it popped up here and there before it was "official"). Very early on, it became representative of many of our religious concepts: community, giving, nurturance, the cornucopia, charity, helping, family, friends, creation, creativity, communion, sharing. From there, it was a short step to becoming our most important holy day.

We chose 12/12 as the day to celebrate it because the German village that provided the concept chose 12/12 as their annual Cookie Day to help make sure everyone in the village had good cookies for the many winter visits and holidays, and their reason aligned so well with ours. Since their celebration wasn't religious, but was cultural and had spread to other villages and morphed into Cookie Exchanges elsewhere, we felt comfortable taking the date as well as the concept.

Weddings and other rites-of-passage are also accompanied by cookie buffets - not as elaborate as the wedding cookie buffets in Phildelphia, but still present, as a symbol of our larger Cookie Day celebration.

Over the decades, we've built up a few traditions surrounding the Day: we fast from all cookies starting December 1st, even as we start baking masses of them for Cookie Day. No eating "broken cookies" (children, pets, co-workers, and neighbors are exempt from this, they love the days running up to Cookie Day), no buying cookies. We read cookie stories to the children. We explain how cookies represent the bounty we all have within us, our inner resources and our contacts and everything we need and have to share. And we bake cookies. Lots of cookies. We box many of the cookies up to take to community centers (not so much the last decade, though, as nursing homes and senior centers have become leery of accepting food items from individuals - that whole terrorist mindset Bush left as his presidential legacy) and to send to distant family and friends.

Those who live close enough spend Cookie Day in friendly gossip and devouring cookies - sweet ones and savory ones. We have dinner cookies that are meal-worthy because the sweet was too much for an entire day - think savory hamantaschen with meat fillings....

Comments

[wide_worlds_joy]

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(Later): Yes, that is you. Hi again.

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