In A Pickle

Okay, parents. Be warned.

Say your child comes home just before Thanksgiving with a class note announcing that her class is beginning a unit on "Pilgrims". Say what the teacher means by "Pilgrim" is anyone who has left their country to come to America. Say the assignment is for each child to identify a "pilgrim" in their family tree and write a report about this person and his/her country of origin. Also involved is the creation of a doll wearing some type of identifiable national garb. Say you encourage your child to pick her Russian-Jewish great-grandmother who actually has quite a dramatic story of escaping the Bolsheviks and surviving the Nazis before coming to America in 1946.

You should have seen it coming, but you didn't. The culmination of all this is that less than a week before Christmas yet another note comes home announcing that the grande finale of all this heritage study and celebration will be yet another of the dreaded Multi-Cultural Feasts in which each student is to bring a dish to share that represents her pilgrim and their country of origin.

This means that after surviving the Christmas pageant, submitting the Christmas Eve bulletin info and staying out till 10:30 at a Session meeting you will be up at 7, trolling the frozen food aisles at the local grocer hoping against hope that you will find some frozen pirogi or blintzes--but finally settling on a nice big jar of kosher dills, some lox and--yup, you guessed it--bagels. (This after agreeing with your 8 year old that the big jar of purple Borscht is NOT an option because no way in heck is she going to be known as the girl who brought BEET SOUP to the feast.)

So--think ahead. If an assignment like this comes your way, consider the culinary implications and pick the ancestor whose cuisine is most likely to appear in your grocer's freezer.