Dinner rituals have nothing to do with class, or with working women's busy lives, or any particular family structure.
CE: So what can parents do to encourage family dinner rituals?
It had been a conscious effort to create family dinner rituals at home.
To see them beat the Broncos last week was to be reminded of a boa-constrictor's pre-dinner ritual.
In my family it's a sort of minor Sunday devotion, with an attendant after-dinner ritual of rummaging for the special cups, worrying the cream and carefully staging the whole vertical assembly.
In sympathy with the American publics dismay over coffee rationing Eleanor also cut the demitasse of coffee from the White House after-dinner ritual.
The monthly dinners, a ritual organized by the longest-serving female senator, Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, are intended to create personal and policy bonds across party lines among the women, a minority in the history of the Senate since its inception.
Now I know that the family dinner is a ritual well, ritualized, in good parenting magazines, endorsed by everyone from Dr. Phil to Ozzies Nelson and Osbourne but, myself, I think it is overrated.
There's a touch of bad faith here, since successful authors are rarely looking at dinner-party rituals from below the salt.
