It’s Not a Good Friday, It’s a Great Friday!

No, it really isn’t, because I have to work. I wish that the sacrifice of our Lord and Savior warranted a day off, but it doesn’t. However, a lot of Good Friday has to do with denial of things so, in honor of the sacred day I will write about all of the wonderful Good Fridays of yesteryear!

I am not very good at denial. I am better at telling things like how they are.

What things are is there is actually not much to say about Good Fridays of yesteryear. In truth, hey weren’t much different than any other Friday, except you couldn’t have cheezburger.

Oh wait! How could I have forgotten??!!11!!

I have been told that back in the day, members of one side of my family were obliged to sit in their rooms for the majority of the day, reading and pondering the Good Book until dinnertime…no, that’s not the thing I forgot. I’m leading into it. Hang on.

Anyway, you’d think there’d be a sigh of relief to be released from that task of squinting at tiny little words for hours on paper thinner than a ladybug’s wing that you’re terrified of tearing everytime you turn a page.

Unfortunately, given the choice, if one were a member of my family, one might rather deign to stay upstairs and slog through a Who-Begat-Who of Prehistoric Society, rather than come down to the dinner table. Why? Mainly, the dish on the menu. Which was: Prunes and Noodles. Yep. Uncooked prunes, with plain noodles.

Which I was subject to because- unlike the Bible study- this tradition somehow managed to stick around through the first 12 years of my life.

I always assumed this was some sort of Catholic tradition. I would casually mention it to my little Catholic friends once I was of school age, in an effort to find comradery in having to eat something icky for dinner and boy does it make you look forward to Easter chocolate even more!

My little school friends were utterly bewildered. This is how I found out that no other families went through this whole routine on Good Friday. In fact, some of them even went out for fish fries.

I stopped talking about Prunes and Noodles pretty soon after that, and chalked it up to being a unique dish whose roots laid in the long-lost cultural traditions of an exotic part of Germany that no one else in my area was also from. It was still icky, but this explanation also made me feel special.

However, as the years have gone by, I became less good at denial and more insanely curious as to whether that comforting assumption was true- that I was special! Or if, alternatively, this was merely a looney-tunes idea that sprung from the befuddled mind of a devout great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of mine, who no one dared cross, and a curse on them if they didn’t continue it after she was six feet under (“Wenn Großmutter sagt, dass wir Backpflaume und Nudeln essen müssen, müssen wir Backpflaume und Nudeln essen!”).

Or- as I’d like to think (if I truly was just a member of a freakish clan)- that was all that remained in the cupboard, and out of sake of pride, it was tied into the higher ideas of repentance and atonement rather than being attributed to abject poverty. If life gives you lemons, and you have no sugar to make lemonade- eat the lemons anyway and declare it a matter of choice to prove that you are bad-ass enough to pull it off without gagging which makes you a good Catholic or something! Shoot- that’s what I’d do.

Anyway! To try to sort this matter out, I first turned to the summation of all human knowledge (Wikipedia) but unfortunately found very few references to any sort of Good Friday gastronomic fare (other than the fishies, and in England they eat hot cross buns! Why did we not do that one?), much less this peculiar entrée. The real troopers of the Catholic persuasion are prone to fasting. Wish I had know that back in the day!

So I went to Google. And what do you know. Maybe I was right about being from an obscure, out-of-the-way Germanic region that was not on the map with no sign at the entrance, thereby making it noteworthy and highly exclusive (this is how we determine the cool factor of NYC nightspots- therefore the logic makes sense). Because as it turns out, there are apparently a few families of Germanic origin who still manage to get a spoonful or two of this down the gullet once a year, out of a sense of obligation. Some say they like it, but of course they’re either in denial or adding fresh parmesan.

One interesting link I found was a gem of a list on a site for a town in Ohio that included not only a directive to choke down the Prunes and Noodles on Good Friday, but includes a whole host of other old adages and rules for living well. The list must’ve traveled over the ocean from the mysterious German village I came from to Ohio. Anyway, the rationale behind the sayings is somewhat questionable. I’m willing to take a shot in the dark and propose that these rather suspect claims are based in superstition as opposed to any sort of scientific assessments- but they are entertaining nonetheless. Have a look!

However, even though the dreaded family custom is included there, I nonetheless uphold that it is not to be lumped together with salt-over-the-shoulder nonsense. It is about sacrifice! It is about living without luxury!

Or it is about that the obscure, out-of-the-way and therefore noteworthy/highly exclusive Germanic village my ancestors lived in was visited by a shyster of a peddler one day, who sold them on this incredible new-fangled dried fruit called “prunes”, which nobody liked so they sat in the back of cupboards. Unfortunately, one Holy Thursday they took to eating like it was the Last- well, you know- and by the time they all woke up the next day for dinner, they were then in the predicament of being stuck with nothing but the prunes and some leftover noodles, and the food peddling service closed early on Friday nights and it was too dark to fish. So, for the sake of dignity and not looking silly, the villagers had to come up with a damn good reason to be making and eating what was decidedly a less than appetizing dinner. Then had no choice but to roll with the justification each year following, for the sake of retaining the faith of the children.

And for that, I don’t blame them!

But I think now, hundreds of years later, at this point we can just say oopsie-daisy and chalk it up to experience. The stories may live on, but as far as actually practicing the tradition, I think we can safely let that fall by the wayside and still preserve our self-respect. After all, I can’t tell you how many times exclusive venues I’ve gone to have had to 86 a basic item or ran out of food altogether. And they don’t let it get them down.

Alright then, Happy Good Friday where you do nothing really different than you normally would on a Friday unless you are religious and are fasting and church-going and not eating cheezburgers in which case Blessings to You, or work for some place that gives you the day off in which case Screw You. And Happy Easter.