Our Favorite Grace

It is another feature in one of my favorite magazines, Taste of Home, that they solicit favorite graces from readers. Most are heavily into "In Jesus Name We Pray" and don't much appeal to me. But rituals do. And so long before we were even pregnant, I started to think of different rituals and traditions that I wanted to include (I used to give a lecture at the museum in Chicago about rituals and traditions in art and could go into how they are different but will spare you all that here. Not that I can remember . . .). Many of these rituals and traditions came from my childhood, and DP's, such as reading the Christmas story while opening stockings, eating a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving, black eyed peas on New Year's, and ham on Easter, or giving out red envelopes for Chinese New Year. Others are our very own. Like the grace we say at dinner.

We all hold hands and wiggle/dance/sway while singing a verse from Raffi--"All I really need is a song in my heart/food in my belly/and love in my family/All I really need is a song in my heart/Love in my family." Then we high-five. It never happens at the beginning; one of them always suggests it in the middle of the meal. Fine, especially because it's usually by the middle of the meal that we're all sitting and settled anyway. The kids won't do it at other meals because there aren't 4 of us to complete the chain; they want DP there. It's funny because I knew I wanted a way to acknowledge the beginning of the family meal and had researched such things online as well as talking to our minister, but I hadn't picked anything. DP and I laughed about using "we made it through another day," from one of our favorite films, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, but it was a little too grown up for our family right now. The other ideas all sounded hokey and contrived, not us.

And then this ritual happened spontaneously one dinner. I'm not even sure I remember how. We were sitting there having dinner, maybe talking about church and the song we'd quoted for our family's lighting of the chalice and we began to sing. Simple, effortless, good.

All I really need is love in my family . . .