Can you say Smorgasbord?

Hey Kids,

How was your week? Lots of essays and homework, no doubt.

I had a pretty busy week too. I kept thinking all week: I have to post a blog, I have to post a blog. And here it is Saturday for me, but maybe somewhere in the world it’s still Friday night or even afternoon.

Yesterday I prepared a smorgasbord. Do you know what that is? Picture a long buffet line. No, I do not run a restaurant, but my family prepared some refreshments for an event. I might have gone a bit overboard in the end. I think the food could have fed 50 happy people, instead of which it fed about 25 very happy people who got to cart food away with them.

I made: a pumpkin pie with a lovely praline pecan topping, an orange-cranberry bread, a humungous Italian salad, sausages and pineapple bits on toothpicks, hummus with mini toasts (really cute!), bowls of assorted nuts, chocolate bark, a punch with floating and sinking fruit, rooibos tea, and squirrel food. This last one is my grandmother’s special recipe. It features peanut butter and is so named because when she made it decades ago and left it out to set (the syrupy goop had to hold its shape), she came back and found a squirrel nibbling at it! It looks a bit like chocolate salami only with completely different ingredients. If you’ve got another name for it, do let me know!

Wow, this sounds like a food blog but all I was trying to do was introduce you to the word smorgasbord. Picture all that food I described spread out on a long table, and you’ll understand smorgasbord. Besides which, it’s a very fun word to say, don’t you think? I hope you’ll use it often. Pepper your conversations with it. Smorgasbord. Smorgasbord. Oh, is that a smorgasbord? Oh, what a lovely smorgasbord!

Another food word I like is cornucopia, sometimes referred to as the horn of plenty. Have you seen pictures of it? It generally looks like a gigantic curved horn woven like a basket, with fruits and vegetables spilling out. It’s a symbol for plenty or abundance, and is used a lot around Thanksgiving. It’s based in Greek mythology, or so my clever son tells me. If you want to write or talk about it, you can refer to a literal cornucopia or a figurative one. Figurative meaning symbolic.

Our bumper crop this year was a cornucopia for the whole village.

The painting of the cornucopia on our wall is a copy from a famous artist; the real one would cost a mint!

So, two new words today. Use them wisely, my little (and big) friends.

Ta ta for now.

P.S. This is my 13th blog post on Perfectly Write Kids! Hope you are enjoying these weekly outbursts on my behalf and hopefully learning something, improving your writing, spelling, grammar, etc. If you know of someone who would enjoy these weekly blog posts, please do help spread the word! Many thanks my friends.