For the Solemnity of the Ascension today we had a picnic, which is a long standing tradition in many parts of Europe.
It's also a bonus if you can have that picnic atop a mountain, because Christ ascended from a mountain.
We have a lot of those around here, so that wasn't hard to do.
(He's either pretending to be Lewis Meriwether or looking for Christ in the clouds, you choose.)
For our meal I pulled out some traditional and symbolic fare.
During the middle ages it was traditional for people to eat birds on Ascension Day because Christ flew to heaven. Rather than cook a whole bird, we had chicken sandwiches. In Italy it is traditional to eat grapes because Christ is the first fruit of all men. So, we ate grapes. And for dessert we had vanilla pudding, which represented the white clouds that Jesus ascended into.
And now we interrupt this blog post for a cute photo of a baby.
After dinner we ventured out for a little "adventure hiking" as Pal calls it.
Everyone was throughly exhausted by the end of the day, and that's how we know we had a successful outing.
