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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3294 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.

Surely that’s true in America as well, right? Or is this an area where Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians have retained something of their ancestral culture? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of people serving dinner to their kids’ friends.

In Sweden they will apparently eat dinner while the guest child is still in the house, which is beyond the pale IME in America (or among my Russian family). That's different from having kids go home to eat at a certain time.

Oh, I agree that that would be a step too far.

Interesting. If I went to a friend’s after school it was always assumed I was staying for dinner and would be picked up afterwards at 8 or 9 (after my parents had eaten), not before.

There were three kids in our house and it was very normal to have 1-2 (or more on Fridays) friends of mine or my siblings over for dinner pretty much every weekday.

In Australia it's weird if you don't feed your kids' friends, and the same was true when I was a kid in the States, although that was back in the late eighties/early nineties. But yeah one of my early memories is of my parents scoffing at my friend's parents on the ride home for being too poor to make me a sandwich or something.

If you don’t mind my asking, whereabouts did you grow up in the States? I’m a bit younger than you, but I also know that my parents never ate dinner at their friends’ houses growing up either. When my dad was young, one of my grandma’s neighbors would ring a farm bell when it was getting close to supper, which was the signal for all the kids in the neighborhood to go home.

Tennessee. Your experience kind of reminds me of when we'd visit my grandparents though, but there my grandma rang the bell to let anyone on the property know it was time to come in for dinner. But now my confidence is shot, so maybe that was to do with her Italianness.

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