2/28/25

Last evening I manned a station at my granddaughter’s Elementary School Heritage Night…a time for students to share their origins. 

Children from kindergarten to the fifth grade helped their parents set up tables loaded with native foods, deserts, candies, pictures, costumes, and posters proudly sharing their origins.

 My family had one of the two tables from Europe, Italy and Poland, dwarfed in number by tables from South America, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Southeast Asia. 

Children whose parents and grandparents came from all corners of the world ran excitedly from table to table sampling foods. Later, shyly at first, their parents did the same until the large crowd became a collage of colors and a people of One. Smiles lit the room as children continued to mix the adults into a beautiful blend. 

I tasted foods from Africa at first and deserts from Armenia but then quickly returned to my stall to hand out biscotti, and chunks of panettone. Anyone who knows this Italian cake bread knows it is difficult to cut, rather it is eaten in “hunks” of moist pure pleasure. 

 I was amazed that over two hours one cake fed more than 100 people each with eyes aglow at the unique taste as it exploded in their mouths. I at one point wondered at the Miracle of Loaves and wondered at how it was that I fed so many. I turned to discover the truth…Angel was replacing hunks as quickly as I could hand them out…

Angel smiled and glowed while I bowed my thanks. 

I saw America last night through a throng of children and parents fed and sustained by so many different foods …including a  “Miracle of the Loaf”…

Pass the last hunk of Panettone please…