Dead Man's Casserole
It's long-standing tradition that when someone dies, friends will bring food over to the family of the deceased. We find something of this even in Shakespeare's Hamlet from five hundred years ago, when Hamlet observed, "how coldly do the funeral meats furnish forth the wedding feast." I have observed this carried out countless times in my life, both in my ministry and personally. As most of us know these meals are sometimes very somber morose affairs, but may occasionally be quite rollicking. My own personal introduction to this practice came in childhood lo these many moons ago. Being the generous and thoughtful person that she was and still is, my mother always carried food over to the home when someone we knew had died. It became her custom to make a delicious casserole with meat, pasta noodles, and cheese, etc. In fact, she made this so frequently for funerals that when the rest of the family saw her making it we asked who had died. The casserole that the