A World of Inspiration for Artful Living
These are one of my favorite holiday cookies. They’re not too sweet; in fact, you might want increase the sugar if you’re making them for kids (on the other hand, if the kids don’t like them…) Anyway, I think they’re absolutely delicious with a good cup of coffee or hot chocolate. [Read more...]
As we discussed in our post about candy canes, those sweet confections have been popular since the 1600s, but the peppermint flavoring they contain has been around a lot longer than that! In fact, there are references to mint in ancient Greek mythology (OMG-maybe the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding was right! Maybe everything really can be traced back to the Greeks!)
According to the myth, Persephone (Remember her?? Pomegranate girl from our post about Demeter…?) became jealous when she discovered that her husband Pluto was in love with the nymph Minthe, so she turned Minthe into a plant. Pluto couldn’t reverse the spell, but he did what he could, and that was to make it so the more the plant was trampled, the more fragrant it would become. [Read more...]
In our post on peppermint candy canes, we noted that symbols can mean different things to different people. I suppose this should come as no surprise when there isn’t even a consensus on what symbolism means…
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest
passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.
John Greenleaf Whittier
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We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
Ralph Waldo Emerson [Read more...]
Have you heard the story about the origin of candy canes? It goes something like this: a candy maker in Indiana wanted to make a candy that represented his Christian faith, so he started with a piece of pure, white hard candy—white to symbolize the Virgin Birth and the purity of Jesus. He formed the candy into a “J” for Jesus. The shape also represented the staff of the “Good Shepherd,” who used it to retrieve members of his flock when they went astray. Then, because the candy maker thought the candy looked kind of plain, he added three red stripes to symbolize the blood of Christ.
This account has been repeated by some religious leaders, has occasionally appeared in the press as the authoritative answer to readers’ queries, and was even the subject of several books, including a children’s book, The “J” is for Jesus, by Alice Joyce Davidson (1998). It’s a nice story, but the thing is, according to Snopes.com (an online fact checker of urban legends), it isn’t true. [Read more...]
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