I’m no exception to this trend, so this devotional is written from a place of weakness, not strength. But as I’ve been thinking about this month’s theme of “Food and Frolic”, I find myself meditating on St. Paul’s dictum that he who does not work shall not eat.

This verse comforts me because it reminds me what food is for. Food is a thing with a purpose. Food lets us work, and work is such a great good that it existed even before the Fall.

So in some ways food is a reward. It’s the proper end to a day full of employment. It’s the proper preparation for a day full of good work. It’s both a reward and a necessity. We need food to do the good things God has given us to do, and we are blessed with food after we do those good things. (Because, after all, if you plant the garden, you get to enjoy its fruits. If you put in the hours, you get the paycheck.)

I think this is why saying grace before our meals is one of the best correctives to the disordered American appetite. So many traditional table prayers contain within themselves a proper theology of food. My favorite is the very simple, “Bless, O Father, thy gifts to our use and us to thy service; for Christ’s sake.”  This to us, Lord, and us to You. Or, as I prayed regularly once upon a time, “Lord, please bless this food, and may I use the energy I get from it to serve You.”

Indeed. Amen!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Originally posted 2012-08-10 10:00:00.

The “Traditional” Regency is a subgenre of the historical romance field whose style, tone, and mores were imitated by and solidified by Georgette Heyer and followers like Clare Darcy, Marion Chesney, and after that so many great authors I still read again and again such as Carola Dunn, Jo Beverley and her early books, Kasey Michaels, another favorite, I could go on and on. These are comedies of manners, which doesn’t mean they’re funny, though the tone is generally fast-paced and lighter than historical romances. These books were squeaky clean. If a couple was married or even indiscreet beforehand, we received no graphic details about their relationship. At one time, about the time I got interested in the genre, every publisher had a traditional Regency line, including some smaller presses. Regency readers were smart, savvy, and up on the time and details of the Regency.

Then the genre died. Door after door closed to the traditional Regency. Those of us who preferred it to the steamier replacements were reduced to reading our old books over and over again, or giving in and just skipping a few pages here and there.

But why did this happen?

Yvonne of the Regency information web site http://hibiscus-sinensis.com/regency explains the problem with a story about something that happened in Sweden, her home country, in the 1930s.

“Back in the 1930s there were two toothpaste companies that basically shared the market. The bigger brand had about 70% of the market and the runner up 30%. The most popular toothpaste had mint taste, not surprisingly, while the other had cinnamon. Market researchers told company #2 to switch to mint also, since it was the more popular taste. So they did. But… People that liked mint toothpaste still bought brand #1, while all those that had bought the cinnamon tasting toothpaste certainly weren’t interested in mint. Company #2 folded due to lack of sales.

The bottom line: Publishers never understood, or rather, wanted to accept that Regencies, like cinnamon toothpaste, are a niche market. Not even in their heyday did they appeal to the general mass market.”

Some claim authors gave into reader and/or publisher demand for steamier love scenes. Some claim the stories got too hung up on historical facts and not enough on character and story. Still others say the problem lay in too much inaccuracy in the stories and readers got disgusted.

Although all of the above are contributing factors, the bottom line is what is usually the situation in business—the bottom line in the accounting books. The traditional Regency just did not sell enough books. Authors moved on to bigger books for which they could get higher advances and more room for character and plot development.

Yet readers still wanted—still want—the traditional Regency. Thanks to digital books and the Christian market, readers can get them again. Many of the authors of the traditional Regency have gotten the rights to their books and made them available through Amazon and other e-book venues. My first Regency was sold to the family friendly–translate squeaky clean—Avalon Books. Family Guardian won the National Readers Choice Award for Best Regency in 2007 (and may end up available digitally now that Amazon owns Avalon). That opened the door for me to sell Regencies in the Christian market. Many others have come along, too. Love Inspired publishes Regencies on a regular basis.

My bottom line on this is that readers are the driving force and will cry out for cinnamon instead of mint until someone makes it available.

(My thanks to the ladies on the Regency fans Yahoo group for their input on this subject and for Yvonne for giving me permission to quote her.)

Originally posted 2012-08-08 10:00:00.

When I get up, I’m hungry. My kids are hungry. The very first order of our morning is breakfast and no one wants to wait around for me to cook so our morning meals consist of toast, muffins (already cooked), waffles (of the frozen variety), and toaster pastries.

The morning food offered in my house fits right in with a Regency breakfast, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Breaking Your Fast Meant You Had To Fast

While the concept of lunch was emerging in the Regency time, it was still not a normal meal. With only two meals in the normal day, breakfast was often delayed several hours after rising. Country farmers or those who worked for a living might eat as early as 8:00AM, but families of leisure would delay the meal until nearly 10:00AM.

Many people would rise, dress, and go for a ride, read books, shop, or write letters for two or three hours before eating. Just thinking about it makes me cringe. I’m so hungry when I first get up in the morning, there is no way I’d be able to concentrate on anything until I had breakfast.

Surprisingly Light for One of Two Meals

Given that it was one of two common meals in the day, one would think that breakfast would be filled with rich, delectable foods that would stay with you for hours. On the contrary, it was frequently toast with butter, honey, or marmalade.

It could be accompanied by meat such as ham or bacon, eggs made an occasional appearance, and those striving to impress a guest might include kippers (a fish dish), cold meat pies, or other types of pastries. Sometimes cake was even served.

Coffee, tea, and chocolate were served as well. I’m not much or a coffee or tea drinker, but I may pick up the habit of a mug of hot chocolate in the morning. It sounds rather appealing.

Of course, chocolate of the Regency period was more bitter, being much closer to raw chocolate than our sweetened version topped with whipped cream and chocolate sauce.

The Creation of Lunch

Because breakfast was such a light meal and dinner creeping later and later, especially for those living in Town, another meal emerged during the Regency.

At first luncheon was considered a feminine thing. Women unable to endure the eight to ten hours between breakfast and dinner started gathering for luncheon. Men, considering it too feminine a pursuit, simple grabbed some food at the pub or club without calling it luncheon. Later in the 1800s it became a more accepted endeavor, morphing into the essential business meal we still have today.

The Modern Variation of Breakfast Habits

Today, breakfast has as many variations as there are people. Some people, like me, eat a breakfast along the lines of Regency fair, simple, light, and fairly high on the carb scale. Others keep alive the tradition of waiting to eat, skipping breakfast and eating an early lunch or a light mid-morning snack. Others swear by that first cup of coffee.

What are your breakfast habits? Do you cook a big breakfast as a family? Grab the most convenient thing on your way out the door? Share your breakfast habits in the comments below.

Originally posted 2012-08-06 10:00:00.

Dawna from Dayton, Washington  won:

 A Captain’s Courtship by Regina Scott. Thank you Regina for stopping by and gifting one of readers. Keep visiting Regency Reflections for more chances to win.

Originally posted 2012-08-05 12:58:46.

A Christmas Tree?
If you see a Christmas Regency romance in the bookstore with a big tree on the cover, all decorated with baubles and sparkly stuff, it is certain the author and/or publisher and/or illustrator didn’t research adequately.

While the tall tree was introduced to England in 1800 by Queen Charlotte (the Regent’s mother), it wasn’t copied except by a few wealthy aristocrats, if at all. Queen Charlotte was of Germanic descent, and Christmas trees had been used in her country for ages. It was a new idea to England, however, and very few people even got to see it.

During the regency, if there was a tree at all, it was a table-top specimen, much smaller than what we are accustomed to, nowadays. Dickens recounts memories of one Christmas of his youth and describes a great, wondrous tree beneath which lay wonderful presents and toys. (No wrapping paper, by the way. Another sign of an ill-informed publisher/illustrator or author is a description of wrapped gifts beneath a tree during the regency. Christmas wrapping paper just wasn’t around, yet.) We have to assume that Dickens was remembering an early experience, in which case even a table-top tree would appear large. We know he was young, because by the time he was 12, his father was sent to debtor’s prison, and you can rest assured that put an end to his having Christmas trees for a time.

In any case, it wasn’t until Prince Albert (also of Germanic descent) once again introduced the really tall Christmas tree in it’s glorious splendor, (in 1845, if memory serves) that it suddenly became all the rage and everyone everywhere started putting up tall ones like his. The newspapers ran a picture of the royal tree and that did it. The growing middle class, now with the power of spending money, ran out to copy the wonderful sight and the upper classes did so, also. But this was long after the regency

Left: Even the larger, royal tree is upon a table! And this is 1845

(When I refer to the regency, by the way, I use the stylistic parameters; in other words, not the POLITICAL regency which was a mere nine years, from 1811 to 1820. But even using the stylistic regency, which extends to the death of George IV (formerly the regent) in 1830, Prince Albert’s large tree is still fifteen years away.)

So, now you know one cool Christmasy fact about this fascinating period. Stay tuned for the 2012 update of my Christmas ebook to learn much more!
Warmest Blessings,

Linore

Originally posted 2012-08-03 19:47:48.

Send

Originally posted 2012-07-27 10:00:00.

Travel Time

One of the distinctives of the Regency is that it was a time of enormous industrial development. Not only were civil engineers learning how to make already common methods of transport (horses, wind-powered ships, etc.) more efficient, they were also developing new ways to get people and materials across vast distances in less time. According to the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain:

“It took nearly a fortnight to travel from London to Edinburgh in 1745, two and a half days in 1796, and around 36 hours by coach or steamer in 1830.”

That’s a lot of change in well under a century. And, of course, rapid technological development led to changes in society as well.

The manufacturers

England was a country that made a lot of its money on its exports, many of which were produced in its northern regions. Items like coal and wool were manufactured in the north of the country and carried down to the south (and thence to distribution points across Europe) by ships on the sea, and, more and more by the time of the Regency, by canal.

So, while the aristocracy might find themselves traveling to the seashore for a holiday, the lower-class man was much more likely to find himself traveling the way most of us have always found ourselves traveling: when our jobs say that we must.

The armed forces

And who, in the Regency, had jobs that were most likely to force them to travel? Besides the merchants, it was the men in the army and navy. As in every era, wars and rumors of war abounded in the Regency. Take your forty shillings from King George and you were likely to find yourself far, far away from your native England. America? France? Even India? All these destinations and more were possible for the man in uniform.  No promises of holiday feasts or vacation amusements, but if you wanted to see the world in the early 1800s, joining up would almost guarantee it.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell 

Originally posted 2012-07-23 10:00:00.

Laurie Alice here,

 “Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”

Luke 12:22-28 NIV

I’m a worrier. I fully confess it. I worry about whether or not I’ll have enough milk until the next time I can get to the store, and I worry about whether or not the pets are getting equal time. I worry about whether or not my husband has a proper lunch, and I worry about every word I write.

Do you know that the word “worry” as into stress over a problem was so new in the Regency that it was not recorded in writing until after the official Regency. I doubt it means they did not worry. They had plenty to concern them in daily life. Especially if you were a single female, you worried about a mate, about whether or not you would always have food and shelter, whether or not you were a burden on your relatives if no mate came along. Mothers worried about their children with infant mortality shockingly high, and men worried about money, crops, wars, the government’s actions. . .

Hmm, you know what? A lot of those issues about which they worried have not changed. Do not single women still worry about a spouse, a life mate? Do not men—and women now, too—worry about jobs, income, wars, the government? Mothers still worry about the safety and health of their children. We worry if our clothes are appropriate for the occasion, or if one really can wear white shoes after Labor Day, despite what your friends tell you. I cannot believe Regency heroines did not have similar concerns.

Yet worry was not in the vocabulary.

And neither should it be in ours. I am sure they used other phrases as distress over or get blue-deviled, fret comes to mind, etc. Yet today we focus on worry far too much.

Jesus commanded us not to worry. God takes care of flowers and sparrows, so why would He not take care of us, His children? The answer is simple: He will. He will supply all our needs.

So let us step back two hundred years and remove “worry” from our vocabulary.

Originally posted 2012-07-20 10:00:00.

Question: What important item have you forgotten when you went on a trip?

“My cell phone charger.” ~ Laurie Alice Eakes

“Cell phone charger.” ~ Ruth Axtell

Noticing a bit of a pattern? 

“My family goes off to a small cottage almost every weekend, June through August, so opportunities to forget abound. I have forgotten many ‘essentials’ such as, butter, swimsuit, camera, milk, jam, and more. The good thing is, there’s always next weekend to try to remember it all.” ~ Susan Karsten

“Ha! I’m not sure my answer is blog-appropriate: I managed to go on my honeymoon without remembering to pack a bra. :)” ~ Jessica Snell

“Well, there’s the very obvious toothbrush. I think I ended up using my husband’s for the night, and hotels usually have toothbrushes available to purchase. (Thank goodness!)

I’ve also forgotten my pajamas before, which is even more embarrassing. Especially when you’re staying with other women. If my hubby had been there, I could have taken one of his extra t-shirts to sleep in. But nope. There I was staying with two other women, and rummaging through my suitcase hoping to find a sleep worthy t-shirt. Not fun!” ~ Naomi Rawlings

“My mother. It wasn’t actually a trip. My 3 year old granddaughter was in her first beauty pageant. I didn’t realize I had forgotten to bring mom until someone at the pageant asked how she was doing” ~ Tammy Kirby

“Socks. I think I forgot them because I was wearing sandals while I packed. For me it wasn’t that big of a deal – I just wore my sandals for the trip. My husband, however, had a bit of a tougher time. Fortunately, there was a Wal-Mart nearby.” ~ Kristi Ann Hunter

What important items have neglected to make their way into your luggage before a trip?

Pictures courtesy of www.MorgueFile.com

Originally posted 2012-07-18 10:00:00.