A Cautionary Tale on Overeating

Every family has its stories. Histories, comedies, dramas. Ours has those and an old fable--a cautionary tale of two foxes.

 I made these polymer covered eggs as Easter gifts for my family, and as soon as my sister opened hers, she started to recite the opening line from the story. Actually, she first mixed it up with Snoopy's "It was a dark and stormy night," but she caught herself and switched to "It was a cold ... something. Neither of us could quite remember what came next.

Even with the brain fog, all it took was the image of the fox to bring back the memory of being an elementary school kid listening to our almost 90-year-old Great Grandma tell us this story. It is cool how family has this short-cut language. I fox will never just be a fox for us.

It wasn't a pleasant story. It was a cautionary tale of gluttony, but we wanted her to tell it over and over again.

Basically there were two foxes that squeezed into a hole in the chicken coop floor. Since we lived on my grandfather's farm, Great-Gram always made the farmer in the story our PaPa. The one fox feasted all night on chickens. The other, realizing the escape hole was quite small, ate only a small amount.

When the farmer arrived in the morning, the smart fox escaped, and the other, well lets just say my Great Grandma described in detail, complete with hand gestures, what happened to the "piggy" fox. Sometimes she would tell it in German, but we new from the hand gestures exactly what was happening.

Now that is a great lesson on not overeating!
 
I did a post a couple years ago about a family recipe scrapbook that has some photos of her if you'd like to meet her.

http://creativesprinkle.blogspot.com/2010/11/recipe-scrapbook-project.html