Who Needs Sapphires, Anyway?

Hubby and I reach another wedding anniversary this week, number forty-four. (And could someone kindly explain to me why four has a ‘u’ in it but forty does not?)

I thought it might be fun to look at the list of anniversary gifts and symbols, something we’ve never adhered to although now I almost wish we had. Both traditional and modern lists exist, so if you’re sentimental (and rich) enough to observe both, you could be due a lot of loot.

Anniversary gifts are listed every year for years one through fifteen. After that, it jumps by five years until you reach seventy-five. That means nothing for year forty-four.

Is it just me, or does this system seem a bit backwards? I think all those presents in the first fifteen years ought to be more evenly distributed. If anything, the rewards for staying together should be heavier on the longevity side. After one year, most couples are still enjoying the warm glow of gushy romance. Some haven’t even finished writing thank you cards for their wedding gifts. They haven’t had time to break a dish or wear out a towel. Why would they need more gifts?

Studying this list, I find I’m short a lot of presents—particularly in the jewelry department. Over the last half of our marriage alone, I should have received pearls, rubies, and coral from the traditional side, diamond and jade if following the modern list. Where’s all my silver, china, crystal, bronze, ivory, and silk from previous years? And what else could “steel” imply from year eleven but a brand-new car?

At a wedding shower, I heard someone wistfully say how lovely it would be to have all new household items again. She suggested we throw showers for each other every few years, say on your fifteenth or twentieth anniversary. I nodded in agreement, then calculated how much stuff I’d be buying for others every year. If we could afford that, we could go out and buy our own new stuff.

When my mother remarried after Dad’s passing, friends threw her a “personal shower.” As we admired all the pretty and sweetly scented gifts, a friend I’ll call Lou remarked, “What do I have to do to be showered like this?”

To which someone else pointed out, “Well, first—Billy would have to die.” Billy is Lou’s husband. I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty, but I’m happy to report Lou and Billy are still alive and married. To each other.

We do love presents, don’t we? But for most of us, following the list of symbolic gifts, whether traditional or modern, would add unnecessary strain to the marriage in the form of financial debt. Some of the best marriages in history thrived without the benefits of fine jewelry, while many an overflowing jewelry box has given silent witness to the heartbreaking trauma of a marriage’s demise.

If gifts aren’t the answer to a successful marriage, what is?

I stumbled upon a thought recently that might be worth consideration. You’ve heard the old saying, “Live every day as though it were your last.” What do you suppose your marriage might look like if you lived every day as though it were your spouse’s last?

Something to ponder as we move into year forty-five. (That’s sapphire, by the way.)

Photo from Canva

 

AT LEAST I DIDN'T BURN 'EM

Forty-three years ago, on October 1, 1977, I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm and said “I do” to Jon Todd. He told me and everyone present that he did, too.

We traveled to Texas for a honeymoon that doubled as a scouting trip to the college Jon would be starting in January. Back home a week later, it made little sense to look for our own place for less than three months, especially when my parents offered to let us live in their motor home. It sat parked in their front yard, but it was ours—in the playing-house sense of the word.

As the weather grew colder, we stubbornly tried to maintain our autonomy, burning through tanks of propane to keep the furnace going.

While I had a job in town, Jon worked on his parents’ farm 45 minutes away. Often, suppertime came at nine or ten o’clock. One night, too exhausted to do a proper job of cleaning the motor home’s little kitchen, I tossed a pan of leftover biscuits into the cold oven to deal with the next day.

But that night, winter hit with a vengeance and our propane ran out in the middle of the night. Enough was enough. We hurriedly moved into a spare bedroom in Mom and Dad’s basement.

After Christmas, we loaded all our earthly belongings into my green 1974 Dodge Dart and headed for Texas as planned. Ironically, we could have survived nicely in a motor home through the Texas winter, but we found a furnished apartment we could almost afford and set up housekeeping for real. When the semester ended, we let the apartment go and returned to Manitoba for the summer. This time we rented a little house while we both worked on the farm.

One weekend, we joined my parents at the beach where they were camping in their motor home. It must have been their first camping trip of the season. We had barely climbed out of our car when my mother greeted me from the steps of the motor home.

“Terrie,” she called out. “Your biscuits are done!”

In her hands she held the pan of biscuits I’d left in the oven six months before.

I’m not sure what became of them after that. Maybe somebody commandeered them for hockey pucks. That pan of biscuits continued to bring us laughs over the years, albeit at my expense.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of biscuits I’ve made since then, but 43 years times three meals a day totals over 47,000 meals.

Doing an average of six loads of laundry a week for 43 years works out to 13,416 loads.

Weekly cleaning of bathrooms, and for most of these years we’ve had two, comes out somewhere around four thousand toilets cleaned. Not counting the decade I spent cleaning other people’s bathrooms.

No wonder I’m tired.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the biscuits. Though I rarely make them anymore, I’ve never found a biscuit recipe to beat this one. So in honor of our anniversary, I thought I’d share.

 BISCUITS

1 ¾ cup flour

2 ½ tsp. baking powder

¾ tsp. salt

1/3 cup shortening

¾ cup milk

Mix dry ingredients together first. Blend in shortening with pastry blender or fork until crumbly. Stir in milk, don’t over mix. Roll dough out and cut in circles with a biscuit cutter or glass. Bake at 450 degrees F. for 10-12 minutes. Makes 12. OPTIONAL: After the meal, return leftovers to the oven for six months. Write the story 43 years later.

“Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.” Proverbs 17:1 (NIV)

 

Weird Wedding Traditions

As of October first, Hubby and I will have been married forty-two years. In a row.

In honor of the occasion, I thought I’d share a few bizarre marriage traditions from around the globe.

In the history of my husband’s home community, the story goes of a young bride who was kidnapped by friends—all in good fun—following the wedding ceremony. The so-called friends decided it would be hilarious to use a tractor’s front-end loader to lift the young woman to the top of a haystack and leave her there. They hadn’t figured on the bride chipping one of her front teeth. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a tooth.

The custom, known in America as a shivaree, was common in the American Midwest farming communities prior to World War II and varied from town to town. Further digging tells me it probably found its roots in France, where the word “charivari” is a French folk custom in which the community gave a noisy, discordant mock serenade by pounding on pots and pans, at the home of newlyweds. The couple was then expected to host the gathered crowd, providing food and drink.

Mauritania is a country in northwest Africa where one marriage custom could not be more opposite from ours. In preparation for her wedding, a bride intentionally tries to gain weight, even going so far as to attend a “fat camp” where she packs on the pounds, disregarding her own health. Why? Because carrying extra weight on your wedding day is considered good luck.

If you are a groom in South Korea, your friends may not allow you to leave until they remove your socks and shoes, tie your ankles together, and beat the soles of your feet with a dead fish or bamboo sticks. Locals believe this practice, called Fаlаkа, makes the groom stronger in his marriage and family life. If you decide to try it, you should know the fish of choice is dried Yellow Corvina.

If you are a bride or groom in parts of rural Scotland or Northern Ireland, you might be subject to a custom called “blackening.” One or both members of the couple have all manner of disgusting slop poured over them—the stickier the better—before being loaded into the back of a truck and paraded around town. The reasons behind this are not clear, but I can’t help wondering if it involves vengeful ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. At least the event occurs several days or weeks before the wedding, so there’s plenty of time to clean up.

If you’re planning a more rustic wedding, you might want to try an old German tradition known as “baumstamm sägen,” the ritualistic sawing of logs by the bride and groom. Sawing a log in tandem symbolizes the couple’s ability to work together in accomplishing tasks that take collective strength and a lot of endurance, as most marriages often do. I think I like that one!

In a recent conversation with a wise friend who happens to be divorced, I heard her make an intuitive statement along these lines. “People should buddy up for life, no matter what. That way you always have someone to help you through the thick and thin. You can ease each other’s old age. Marriage was a really good idea.”

Yes, it was. Maybe not the crazy customs, but the spirit of it for sure.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9)

A Lesson from Winter on Love, Sex, & Marriage

One benefit of these frigid Manitoba mornings is, you don’t waste time staring into your closet deciding what to wear. You simply wear it all.

As I bundle up for my morning walks to work, I’ve been contemplating the importance of doing things in the proper sequence. Long johns before pants, pants before ski pants. Then boots, parka, hood, scarf. Backpack. Gloves. Big leather mittens over the gloves. It all works together quite nicely to help me survive the brutality known as our weather.

But what if I decided to mix it up one morning because I’m bored with the routine or feeling a bit rebellious? Maybe I want to put my long johns on last, or my boots first. What if I put on my backpack and then tried putting my parka on over that? Or maybe I could put on my big leather mitts first. It could be done—maybe. But by the time I managed to zip my coat and tie my scarf while wearing those bulky mitts, I’d be frustrated to tears. I’d be sweating like a boxer. And my work day would be almost over.

Doing things in the right order applies to so much of life, doesn’t it? No matter how much we might like to skip some steps, especially if they’re hard, life works better in a certain order. We need the education before the good job, and the experience before the better job. We must practice before proficiency comes. We’re required to raise children before we can spoil grandchildren. Buckle up before driving off.

Oh sure, we can try doing things cart-before-the-horse. It might even work, with effort. Instead of washing dishes right after we’ve eaten off them, we could wash them just before we eat. Either way, we’re eating off a clean dish, so what’s the big deal? But seriously, who wants to be scraping off yesterday’s stuck-on spaghetti before you can enjoy tonight’s chicken?

You might succeed at driving to the gas station on a flat tire and then putting air in it. You could try washing a dirty floor before you sweep up the loose dirt. It’s possible to dress first and then take a shower. It’s also really, really dumb.

How about marriage, sex, and having babies? These days, people laugh at the idea of saving sex for marriage. Like it’s downright dumb.

But is it? Have you ever met anyone who waited and regretted it? I haven’t. Present company included. Most things work a whole lot better when done in the right order. Your Creator knows you and put some rules in place that He knows will, if followed, work best for you and the order of your life. Sure, you can change the order and “get along fine.” Lots of people appear to do exactly that.

And lots of people don’t. They carry around emotional scars from past relationships which deeply and negatively affect their present one—wounds they could have avoided by doing things in the order intended by the One who knows them best, loves them most, and understands their heart.

Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate love and romance and sex. It’s a cold world, friend. Why make your life harder than necessary? Bundle up in the right order.