'...Give them to your daughters, give them to your sons...'

Growing up in Little Village, a neighborhood on the near Southwest Side of Chicago, hot cross buns were an annual Lenten tradition. I hadn't even thought of the sweet, citron-filled buns with the cross made of icing in years.

During grade school and high school, I'd often have hot cross buns for breakfast during Lent, especially during the years when we lived across the street from a bakery on Keeler Avenue. Like Italian beef sandwiches and Tom Tom Tamales, it simply never occurred to me that this familiar food wasn't as common everywhere as it was in Chicago. But while I'm sure they had them in Dubuque, a heavily Catholic city where I went to seminary, and in St. Louis, where I had my first parish, with my departure from Chicago I lost track of them, and they simply passed from my consciousness.

But my memory was jogged Sunday at church, when one of the kids quoted a rhyme she'd heard at school, one my mom used to recite:

Hot Cross Buns! Hot Cross Buns!

Give them to your daughters, give them to your sons!

One a penny, two a penny, Hot Cross Buns!

It really took me back. I haven't even seen hot cross buns since I left the Chicago area back in 1981.

Another tradition in our family was a frosted pound cake baked in the shape of a lamb and purchased at Fingerhut's Bakery in Cicero in celebration of Easter. Again, a tradition I haven't even thought of in eons.

Funny the memories a silly rhyme can evoke...

Photo: Fabiform

ADDENDUM: It's interesting to me how we commemorate a penitential season like Lent with treats, of all things. Hot cross buns are an example. But then, one Lent during my seminary days, the politically correct leaders of the student body decided that we would (voluntarily, mind you) display our solidarity with the hungry of the world by eating nothing but hash browns for breakfast.

Let all God's people say "Amen!" Which we did. With great, great enthusiasm. I even started getting up early to be sure I got to breakfast.

Of course, the typically empty and purely symbolic liberal gesture collapsed when the student body realized that contrary to our assumption, the money being saved by serving hash browns instead of eggs and pancakes and bacon and sausage and so forth was not, after all, being contributed to world hunger. I myself felt called upon to make the sacrifice and stop eating hash browns every morning in order to send the message that I, for one, did not find empty, symbolic gestures terribly meaningful.

And even at Warthog Theological Cemetery, I had plenty of company.