Good Enough For a 6-Year-Old

Today, I indulged in a yogurt-honey-banana concoction that took me back to grade one. The year I learned that a perfect summer's day was 23 degrees Celsius. The year Jim Henson died. The year I starred as Goldilocks in our class play.

My best friend was a boy. We were best friends in kindergarten, boyfriend/girlfriend in the first grade, and husband and wife in our make-believe world. And he lived in a church.

You would think that the pastor's kid wouldn't be impressed by church architecture, but his converted home (the master suite was the balcony) was the coolest building I had ever been in. And the kitchen was elevated, where the platform once was. Instead of preaching, there was cooking. "Give us this day our daily bread" indeed.

I loved his mom. She was a gentle, soft-spoken woman with curly hair. I've always wanted curls. And one day, she sliced bananas into our yogurt, drizzled honey over it, and served me the greatest snack I'd ever had. A treat I still crave 20 years later.

(His father was another story. The kind of story that deserves its own blog entry. Or novel.)

I haven't seen my church-dwelling friend since the fifth grade. But he'll always be my first husband, albeit a pretend one.

And as the most awkward segue ever, I read about the origins of the honeymoon today (I was talking about fake husbands and honey, so this is almost related). Abduction and mead. Very romantic. I need to get myself a Viking.

The honeymoon
The more I research the origin of the honeymoon, the more I wish I was a Viking. (To be fair, everything makes me wish I was a Viking.) Legend has it that Northern European men in the mood to marry used to abduct their wives from neighboring villages and take them into hiding while the bride's father and brothers hunted them down. This hiding period came to be known as the honeymoon. How romantic.

The name itself came from a drink the bride and groom would share — mead — that was made from honey. Couples would drink a cup of mead per day during the first 30 days of marriage, presumably to take the edge off the wife's recent kidnapping. (Admit it. There's a part of you that longs to be kidnapped by a take-no-prisoners Norseman who never wears shirts. I know how you women think.)

In a twist of fate that surely has generations of Viking fathers rolling over in their fiery ship graves, many parents now pay for their daughter's honeymoon. (To keep up with modern times, perhaps we should rename the whole tradition boxedwinemoon. I'm just throwing that out there.)

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Side note: Apparently you can write like a blogger on MSNBC.com. What could have been an informative little piece of journalism reads as pretty on her toes-ish, don'tcha think? I need to line up a writing gig like that. Side comments about Vikings and renaming the honeymoon as "boxedewinemoon"? I could do that. While eating bananas and honey.


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