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Health & Fitness

Donuts

Today I am grateful for donuts.  Why not?  It’s Fasnacht Day, which is also called Shrove Tuesday, a tradition that began so that you would use up all of your lard, butter, fat and sugar and make enough donuts to feed all of Philadelphia, before Lent, which begins tomorrow. 

 

When I lived in the Midwest I had never heard of Fasnacht Day, but in Pennsylvania it’s a very big deal.  Hey, I’m all about any day that celebrates with donuts!  But for me donuts should either be crispy, with four tons of yummy frosting and jimmies; or they should be pumped full of white cream, frosted in heavy chocolate and ooze everywhere when you bite into them.  I’m palpitating just thinking about them.  Those are not fasnacht’s, although I’m not sure, but maybe they could pass.  In my area  Fasnacht donuts are usually sort of dry, boring, dough-pillows.  Traditionalists swear there is no hole and other traditionalists swear there is a hole.  I’ll let them to hash it out.

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I’m going to piss of a bunch of Pennsylvanians now because I really don’t like fasnacht donuts.  I want to.  Heaven knows I like sugar and fat and potatoes, three key elements of the donuts.  I can’t even pretend to not like sweets.  I’ve made it very clear that I would take hostages for even a small slice of wedding cake, especially if it has a rose.  But I don’t like fasnacht.  It’s just not my drug of choice.

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If you grew up in Pennsylvania, surrounded by Pennsylvania Dutch (German) folks, Fasnacht Day is huge.  I have a friend I’ve known for 25 years who gets up at o’dark thirty on Fasnacht Day every single year.  When her three boys were little, even toddlers, she would haul them out of bed and they would all make the donuts. When they were in elementary school they made and ate them before getting on the bus.  As teenagers, when I figured they would balk at the whole idea and sleep in like teenagers do, they still hauled butt out of bed to make the donuts with her.  Back then I asked the youngest why he got up, even before his mom, to start the donuts and he simply said, “Tradition.”

 

Now, with her boys morphing into married men before our very eyes, they still come over to her house at screechy-dawn to make the donuts on Fasnacht Day, but not alone.  They bring wives and sleepy-eyed grandchildren with them and make them before the kids have to catch the bus, the parents have to get to work, and their grandma has to get to school to teach.  It doesn’t matter if they all hit an exhausted sugar wall and crash at two in the afternoon.  Some traditions are just worth it. 

 

For me, Thanksgiving is a tough eating holiday for obvious reasons (stuffing, pie).  Christmas, with all of the munchies and cookies is difficult.  Don’t wave Halloween Candy within ten inches of my face, or risk losing an arm.  But Fasnacht Day is an easy eating holiday for me.  I take one tiny bite of a donut because I want to support tradition and stave off superstition, then I leave the rest.  Don’t let the sugar on my face tell you any differently.  Honest. 

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