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January 10, 2010

Booking for Valentine's Day or Anti-Valentine's day since that is much more my style. I have very limited availablity, but there are a few spots left. Please contact me if you are interested in booking a shoot.

Best wishes - Hailey

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January 1, 2010

Happy New Year. My furry children do not much like it when I put hat on them, but no matter what I like to occationally put party hats on them. Malachi does not at all apprecitate it.

We had our black eyed peas and cabbage at midnight as well as later on in the day. This brought up a few questions from my friends in other states as to why the strange tradition. I never really knew why it was that black eyed peas were eatten for luck and cabbage for money, but I was able to find out why according to Wikipedia.

"Eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day is thought to bring prosperity.

The "good luck" traditions of eating black eyed peas at Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, are recorded in the Babylonian Talmud (compiled ~500 CE), Horayot 12A: "Abaye [d. 339 CE] said, now that you have established that good-luck symbols avail, you should make it a habit to see Qara (bottle gourd), Rubiya (black-eyed peas, Arabic Lubiya), Kartei (leeks), Silka (either beets or spinach), and Tamrei (dates) on your table on the New Year." However, the custom may have resulted from an early mistranslation of the Aramaic word rubiya (fenugreek).

A parallel text in Kritot 5B states that one should eat these symbols of good luck. The accepted custom (Shulhan Aruh Orah Hayim 583:1, 16th century, the standard code of Jewish law and practice) is to eat the symbols. This custom is followed by Sephardi and Israeli Jews to this day.

In the United States, the first Sephardi Jews arrived in Georgia in the 1730s and have lived there continuously since. The Jewish practice was apparently adopted by non-Jews around the time of the American Civil War.

In the Southern United States,the peas are typically cooked with a pork product for flavoring (such as bacon, ham bones, fatback, or hog jowl), diced onion, and served with a hot chili sauce or a pepper-flavored vinegar.

The traditional meal also features collard, turnip, or mustard greens, and ham. The peas, since they swell when cooked, symbolize prosperity; the greens symbolize money; the pork, because pigs root forward when foraging, represents positive motion. Cornbread also often accompanies this meal.

Another suggested origin of the tradition dates back to the Civil War, when Union troops, especially in areas targeted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, typically stripped the countryside of all stored food, crops, and livestock, and destroyed whatever they couldn't carry away. At that time, Northerners considered "field peas" and field corn suitable only for animal fodder, and didn't steal or destroy these humble foods."

May this New Year bring newly found prosperity, love, happiness and delight in your life.