Whatever happened to recipe books? Every community had them. Usually they were put together by local churches or community organizations, and in the books people would put their favourites to share with the world. They hoped their contributions would sell cookbooks to raise money for their community projects.
The books were fun. The women got together over coffee and tea biscuits to review each other’s contributions while enjoying one another’s company. Some recipes were quickly eliminated. Others stood the scrutiny and were pasted onto roughly clad first editions to send to their printers. I suspect that one or two of the women did most of the work for the books but no one can deny the genuine fellowship that most of them enjoyed.
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With so many publishing houses loading the shelves in bookstores with command recipes for healthy living and calorie-free diets, community books are no longer a guaranteed money raiser. We need new projects. And these new ventures have turned into community calendars.
These are not ordinary calendars. They are calendars beholding of the body beautiful, with pictures of people wearing few or no clothes. I think they started with pictures of some firefighters, but they quickly spread to the ultimate hockey players and others from various community groups.
I understand that the latest are calendars with similar pictures of grandparents. Some calendars capture the magnificence of grandmothers. Others are reserved for the splendor of grandfathers.
None of the pictures in the calendars are provocative or suggestive. They just happen to be a little skimpy in what people are wearing. The last I heard, the grandmothers’ calendars were slightly outselling those of the grandfathers, but both are selling reasonably well.
The grandparents who engineered the community calendars are having a lot of fun with their projects, despite having their pictures taken in cold prairie breezes. They are carrying the spirit of comradeship while raising money for their projects.
I am not sure that our ancestors who made the recipe books would necessarily approve of the calendars, but they would appreciate the enthusiasm and determination that everyone shares in putting them together. They would also understand that healthy communities are active ones and that a different world requires innovative projects.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor, living and working in west-central Saskatchewan who has taught social work for two universities. Mail correspondence in care of Western Producer, Box 2500, Saskatoon, Sask., S7K 2C4 or e-mail jandrews@producer.com.
