ABSTRACT
Producing overflow in order to enjoy, relax, and socialize in a close circle of relatives and friends is probably as old as humankind, as is the importance of food and drink at these gatherings. There are huge differences, however, between the months of saving, sacrificing, and storing that produced the Swedish peasant’s annual Christmas feast of the past, and the present-day weekly celebration of Cozy Friday, when family members gather in front of the television for snacks, sodas, and a pleasant moment together. Cozy Friday happens in the midst of a consumer society. For most people who lead affluent lives, it is about popping into the store Friday evening and buying whatever they desire to produce fredagsmys, as Cozy Friday is called in Swedish. There is little hardship involved, except for the stresses of balancing work and leisure, collecting tired kids from day care, enduring congested traffic on the way to the shopping mall, and the long queues in front of the check-out counter, while keeping their kids reasonably happy and themselves calm. 1 Neither has Cozy Friday much in common with another modern family mealtime event, the bourgeois dinner, which shares with the peasant family dinner a strict pedagogic content, in which children are to learn the manners and rituals of their subordinate and gendered positions (Brembeck, 1992). Even if Cozy Friday may involve deferred gratification for children and parents, to the extent that they must wait for Friday to get their sweets, it is not primarily a pedagogical event. On the contrary, it is very much a “childish,” child-centered occasion, even performed for the sake of the children.
