When I was a kid, we always had a Sunday dinner either at home or with the grand parents. It was usually chicken, whole, deliciously cooked by Mom, complete with several vegetables and mashed potatoes and home made chicken gravy, and fresh biscuits. The whole family attended and there was always a dessert like ice cream, home made cake or home made pies. Afterwards, we all just goofed off and enjoyed a relaxing Sunday afternoon. Sometimes my Dad would pile us all in the car and we would take a pleasant Sunday drive, out in the country, looking at areas we had not looked at before, stopping here and there to get out and examine some places, to look in the great, local drainage canals to see what was there and enjoying each other’s company.
Sunday dinner could he had at the Grandparents, on the porch, on a long wooden table, with the breeze blowing through the screens and two delicious chickens baked to perfection, with the aunts and uncles, fresh baked cakes and pies by both families and afterwards, us kids went out in the local woods to play and relax under great shady trees while the folks sat around and watched TV, chatted and exchanged pleasantries and now and then we might convince the Uncle or Aunt to play checkers or Old Maid with us.
Mostly, it was just a good, relaxing way to spend the day. It stopped ages ago as we all got jobs that required we work on Sundays, or lovers we just had to be with and my grandmother and later, my father passed on. Siblings moved out of the house and moved away, but it seemed all real common back then for everyone to have Sunday Dinner, but not, it seems, today. Know anyone who still has it? It was nice when I was a kid.
We have family dinners every night. I cook meals just like that, and we sit and talk about our day at school/work/whatever.
It’s nice.
Thursday night while we were having our dinner the neighbor boy kept comming to the screen door distracting our heathens while they were trying to eat.
My husband told him to go home and the heathens would be out when we were done. And then he went into a tirade about doesn’t that kid have a home, and doesn’t he know it is dinner time?
Well, not everybody eats like we do dear. We are a dying breed. And it’s not that some people don’t want to, but like you stated, folks are just too busy anymore.
My family never did the traditional Sunday Dinner thing, either at our house or the grandparents’ houses. In the summer, Sundays were spent at my maternal grandparents’ cabin on the Magothy River. I don’t recall anything special about Sundays the rest of the year.
We always had dinner as a family during the week, and I try to do that with my little family now, when swim practice or chorus concerts or 2000 other things don’t interfere. The pace of life has changed way too much in the last 30 years…
At my house we never eat together ever, but Mr Fran and his family eat together every single night and always do a proper Sunday dinner. His parents are fantastic cooks and I love eating there, especially since his dad makes the best mashed potato in history.
We sit, talk and drink much wine. Free food and alcohol. That’ll do for me.
My family has always had Sunday dinners at Grandma’s house.
Of course, I lived at Grandma’s growing up, but on Sunday at least one set of cousins would show up and we’d have a nice dinner. My family is Italian, so we’d always have something like ravioli with meatballs and sausages, a big salad, and lots of bread.
The men would watch sports on tv, the ladies would talk in the kitchen, and the kids would play up in my room or outside.
Now all the kids have grown up, and Grandpa has passed away, but Grandma still cooks a Sunday dinner, even if it’s just for her, her sister and my mom.
I live 200 miles away now, but I make the trip to NY at least once a month. Grandma always looks forward to it, and makes all my favorite foods.
Sometimes I hate the fact that I live so far away from my family, there is no one here to cook for, except my husband and myself. He usually works on Sundays too, so most of the time I’m home alone anyway.
:sigh:
I’m homesick now.
Between Domino’s pizza, McDonald’s and the fact that, evidently, over 90% of the population is entirely incapable of cooking anything more complex than a microwaved TV dinner, the much beloved Sunday Dinner has gone the way of the horse and carriage.
I wonder just how much of our unraveling social fabric is directly traceable back to the deemphasis of family dining and all of the attendant society it promotes. The kitchen was once the warmest place in the house and a center for nearly all activity. Fragmented families and schedules are playing havoc with societal cohesion and I, for one, lament the loss of home cooked meals served at table.
I saw Zenster was the last poster and knew he was going to post EXACTLY THAT. I know sometimes the situation looks bleak, but I think you’ll find a lot more Sunday dinner going on than you think in America.
Sunday was a good day in my house. Mom would get us up early for church (groan) but after that there would be pancakes or french toast followed by a lazy day of reading the paper or finishing up chores. Then we’d have an early dinner - in the summer, grilled chicken or steaks or pork chops, with fresh corn on the cob and salad from the garden. In the winter, roast chicken, roast beef, meatloaf, with mashed potatoes and garden vegetables we’d frozen in the summer.
In D.C. my best friends and I had our own Sunday dinner tradition. We were all young singles living in studio apartments in the same building, and we are all GREAT cooks, so at Zenster :). My friend Dan and I would pick a recipe out of one of the cookbooks in the afternoon, we’d go and shop for the ingredients, and make a feast - things like donar kabob, roast pork with garlic mashed potatoes and a sour cherry sauce, lasagna, spinach and cheese enchiladas with homemade salsa, coq au vin. Mikey would help us chop and bring dessert. We’d eat at the table with candles, or we’d rent a movie, or watch the X-Files. Sometimes we’d crack open a bottle of wine, sometimes Mikey would make us chocolate milk. We had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and if one of them called that evening we’d invite them to come by. These guys were my family during those three years, and Sunday dinner was the fabric that bound us together.
I don’t think Domino’s, etc are really to blame. It’s the schedules.When I was a kid,activities were either immediately after-school, or started around 7pm.My family had no problems eating dinner together until my siblings and I were old enough to get jobs (which was in high school).My son and daughter (ages 10 and 11) have each had Scout meetings that started at 6pm,sports practices and games that start at 6pm,choir practice that starts at 6pm, etc.Whenever we’re all home at a reasonable hour, we eat dinner together,but when one of the kids has something at 6pm my options are 1)The three of us have dinner early,without my husband,2)the kids have dinner early and I have dinner with my husband 3)we all wait until 8pm when everyone’s home 4)kid and parent who are not out have dinner at a reasonable time-other parent and kid have dinner when they get home. I’m not thrilled with any of those options, but #3 is the worst at my kids’ ages.
Work schedules have also changed. I grew up in the '60s and '70s in a working-to-middle class neighborhood.People (fathers,really) usually got home from work by 5:30 pm,since they generally worked fairly close to home in jobs that ended around 5pm.Mothers were almost always at home, so a freshly cooked family dinner by six or so was possible.Sure, some jobs required longer hours, or shift work, but it wasn’t nearly as common as it is now. Now, between longer hours (10 hour days are not uncommon),odd hours (many businesses are open later than they used to be,so that even when someone only works 8 hours,they still may not leave work until 9 or 10 pm) and longer commutes (2 hours each way is not unusual around here),a family dinner is often impossible.
But anyway,Zenster, i don’t know how much the family dinner,in itself, promotes cohesiveness.I had too many friends as a kid whose families ate dinner together every night,yet home life was anything but warm and the kids weren’t expected to be anywhere in the house but their own room. I suspect that the relationship is more the reverse-warm and cohesive families try to do things together,and one of those things is dinner.
When I was in high school, my parents would frequently cook a large meal and invite my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin over to share it with us. Part of this was due to the portions involved-my dad loves to fish and when he fries fish he doesn’t do it in small portions. We would usually end up watching King of the Hill and The Simpsons while we ate, but we did eat together. Does this count as a Sunday dinner?
My family does Sunday Dinner and has since before I was born. We do the evening meal now, since that gives more time to prepare the meal and clean house. Mom usually cooks, but sometimes my sister-in-law and brother cook, and I’ve even done it a couple of times. Or one of us springs for the meal at a restaurant.
Zenster, it would be nice if we could solve all of our problems by making sure that we ate dinner together. However, I knew a guy once whose family did the traditional family dinner every week. He ended up in jail for murder.
My family never really did “Sunday Dinner” as a ritualistic kind of thing, but we always make it a point to eat together if at all possible. Since I don’t have much on my social calandar when I’m home from college and my brother’s not into many extracurriculars now that he’s a high school senior–the LAN parties don’t start until 9 or 10, which is a big help–it’s not too hard to get everyone around the table around 7 or so. Which pleases me to no end, since I’m the only one in the family who looooooves to cook and I get to handle it all every night.
Some call it predictability, I prefer to think of it as consistency.
I will freely admit to having my perceptions skewed by living in California. Due to the incredibly fine weather we have out here, we also have a very mobile society. There has been a distinct reduction in the amount of hospitality and family togetherness more commonly shown in other less favorable climes.
For some reason cooking has assumed a mantle of mystery for many when it really is a matter of practice more than just about anything else. There is a lot of family lore and tradition being lost because the chance to transmit it is ever dwindling in our busy daily schedules. I may be over-romanticizing the thought of all this but little remains of traditions these days and I lament their passing.
We have Sunday NIght Dinner every week where I work. Only about 10 people ever show up. Not worth the cost, quite frankly. As for me, personally, no, we hever had that tradition. Though we did always try to have one meal a week together, it just wasn’t always on the same day.
We don’t do it every Sunday, but on special weekends (Easter, Father’s Day, family birthdays) we get together at Mr. Cranky’s parents’ house and my MIL cooks a big Sunday dinner. We eat it around 2 pm or so. We even do this on Mother’s Day because my nana-in-law doesn’t go to restaurants anymore. My poor Mother in law, even has to cook on Mother’s Day.
Yes, the men in the house should cook, but they are incapable of this sort of thing and seem unwilling to try.
I cook a roast beef dinner with roasted taters, yorkshire pudding, veggies, etc. pretty much every Sunday. My bro and a friend come. It was always a tradition in our family. My dad cooked a big meal and he said he knew we would all show up.
I live 400 km from my nearest relatives - but every time I go see Dad, his wife makes huge amounts of wonderful food. We spend the day in the kitchen, baking and cooking and visiting, and she teaches me how to make all kinds of new Ukranian foods.
Aw shucks Canadian Sue, I’m Canadian too, and the roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, was a regular Sunday ritual of my childhood too. I know it came from one ancestor from England who packed his trunk and took passage on a sailing ship to Canada at the dawn of the twentieth century. I visited my 78 year old mother this summer and she was saying she used to buy a slab of suet and roast it on top of the roast beef to make it juicy and tasty “and that’s why we have so much cardio troubles now”. Well mom, dad’s 82 and you’re 78 and you’re both still playing golf, so it couldn’t have been too toxic.
We always did Sunday dinners when I was a kid though they weren’t the stereotyped nuclear family image. My parents divorced when I was 5 and each weekend my sister and I stayed with our father. Grandma lived with him and she was a stickler for serving a proper SUNDAY DINNER.
It was great, and I miss it. She was German; born here but still spoke the Lord’s Prayer in German. A whiz of a cook, too. Nothing fancy but honest, heartwarming food, carefully prepared. We’d eat, help clean up then trek back to Mom’s house.
Weird, because I live alone now but my schedule has looped me right back to Sunday dinners. Saturday is for cleaning, marketing, errands, etc. and Sunday is spent prep-cooking for the week. (Just stored the ratatouille–love summer zukes, tomatoes and herbs!–, boiled black beans for burritos, veggies chopped and ready for quick pad thai…) Grandma wouldn’t recognize the foods but she’d applaud the rest.
It’s Sunday, I’m alone but dined on ratatouille over penne pasta, salad, garlic bread, red plum for dessert and 2 glasses of merlot. Served on good china with cloth napkins.
And was happy as a clam.
This is…spooky. Until this thread I’d honestly never realized how that early imprinting has carried over. Life is so different now the whole process just seemed sensible and automatic.
Grateful if a bit unnerved by early programming,
Veb
In addition we treat Sunday’s different than the rest of the week in ways other than the meal.
We try to do most the yard work, housekeeping and shopping on Saturday so that before and after church on Sunday remains free for relaxed family time.
The kids and adults do not go off in different directions. If we accept or offer social invitations they are family oriented.
We’ve discouraged participating in competitive sports and recitals on Sunday, for us this has proved most challenging with sports. He is a competitive swimmer and is seems like when he qualifies for All-Stars or All City finals his qualifying strokes are always on Sundays. He’s old enough and good enough that at this point we’d not insist on skipping it for the sake of family time, but thus far he continues to choose family sundays over his swimming.
If you want to feel emotionally connected and loved in the way that the “Sunday dinners” of your youth made you feel, then you have to put some thought and effort into making them happen consisently. If you don’t live near biological family, then create the traditional feel with like minded friends.
at Zenster :). My friend Dan and I would pick a recipe out of one of the cookbooks in the afternoon, we’d go and shop for the ingredients, and make a feast - things like donar kabob, roast pork with garlic mashed potatoes and a sour cherry sauce, lasagna, spinach and cheese enchiladas with homemade salsa, coq au vin. Mikey would help us chop and bring dessert. We’d eat at the table with candles, or we’d rent a movie, or watch the X-Files. Sometimes we’d crack open a bottle of wine, sometimes Mikey would make us chocolate milk. We had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and if one of them called that evening we’d invite them to come by. These guys were my family during those three years, and Sunday dinner was the fabric that bound us together.
Mom usually cooks, but sometimes my sister-in-law and brother cook, and I’ve even done it a couple of times. Or one of us springs for the meal at a restaurant.