picture from tinytestkitchen.com (visit them for great recipes)
Although I am not the baker in the house and I won’t be spending time this holiday in the kitchen baking up Christmas cookies, I was struck by baking being an apt metaphor for life, especially after seeing some holiday baking commercials on television. The commercials talk about home-made cookies made from a box (filled with dry ingredients).
Is that the new definition of home-made on the YBR? Is the only difference between store-bought and home-made the fact that to call it homemade you simply empty the contents of a box in a bowl and add eggs, oil and water? Or is it a matter of cutting slices off a roll of prepared cookie dough?
I think we are further deluding ourselves by thinking that today’s version of home-made is actually home-made. To me home-made means taking out all of the ingredients, sifting, measuring, mixing, etc.
But then I got to thinking. As home-made as that process might be, it too, is not really home-made. For that to occur you’d actually have to plant the wheat (and turn it into flour), raise the chickens that lay the eggs, grow and refine the sugar, etc.
I don’t think it’s necessary to go to that extreme because in the “baking” of ourselves, we have been gifted with the ingredients that go into us…keeping in mind that all of us are not the same and therefore we all don’t include the same ingredients.
When Dorothy landed in Oz she was given all the ingredients she would need to “bake” herself. She wasn’t handed a box with all the dry ingredients measured to perfection. She had to gather, sift and measure. She had to follow her own unique recipe. In the end she was home-made.
Today we are like a box. Instead of having to follow our own recipe we settle for taking pre-measured ingredients…and then we go around proudly proclaiming we are “home-made.”
Not true. We have become cookie cutter people. And that scares me because more and more people aren’t even willing to go to that much trouble, settling instead for something they take off the shelf. It makes us half-baked human beings.
Along The Yellow Brick Road 