King's Day

I had honestly never heard about King's Day until I hooked up with Luisa. My parents didn't spend a lot of time discussing timelines and history and the significance of days. They weren't big on explaining things. They just loved a good party. I had always wondered about the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" because, as far as I could tell, we only had one day of Christmas and (thankfully) no partridge in a pear tree. I assumed that the song must actually be for Hanukkah. Feel free to pick apart the many things wrong with that. So, it was Luisa who first explained the whole King's Day thing and how it was the culmination of the twelve days of Christmas. Suddenly, it all made sense. Luisa's family has a tradition that you eat pomegranate seeds on Christmas for happiness, New Year's Day for health and King's Day for wealth. I like rituals so I was quickly on board with this one.  The first time I ever had a pomegranate was at a celebration hosted by the Latin club at school. I fell madly in love with them and would buy them occasionally because they made me feel fancy. Back in the days of old, you had to peel pomegranates yourself which is a huge pain in the ass. The juice gets everywhere and you are forever picking out the jeweled seeds. I've often said that I should go on a pomegranate diet because I would become so exhausted by the extraction of the seeds that I would never eat enough to maintain my weight. In this great modern world we live in, however, you can buy pomegranate seeds in a container and you don't have to peel them at all. Luisa bought such a container at Christmas which got us through happiness and health. Today, we were supposed to eat the seeds for wealth which is one that we obviously have forgotten over the years. We had run out of the seeds from the box so I had to peel the pomegranate. It's been years since I've done that and you know what? It's still a pain in the ass. There was juice all over the cutting board, the wall behind the cutting board, the floor, my hands, Zeca's face and the sink. It was a bloodbath but I eventually triumphed over the freaky fruit. It took me 20 minutes to get all the seeds out of that thing and it took 5 minutes for my kids to devour them all. So, if 2011 is particularly rough for you financially, you can blame our kids. That's what we do.