Regional favorites

I was shocked - SHOCKED - when I went to the grocery store the other day. Next to all the disgusting-looking Mardi Gras cakes were three familiar red and white boxes. I hadn't seen them in about 2 years, and I stopped looking for them after I couldn't find them last year. They were just sitting there, looking very sad, in the middle of a crowded grocery store bakery section. On the sides of the box, it said..... "PACZKI"!

You can read all about paczkis on Wikipedia, but essentially they are huge donuts filled with some kind of confection, usually fruit-based. Oh, and in Detroit we pronounce it POONCH-key. They're made for Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday, because the idea is that you take all the bad-for-you baking ingredients you have, throw them all together, and produce these massively caloric pastry-meals. And by you, I mean you if you are Polish, because that's where the tradition comes from.

There are so many paczkis in Detroit at this time of year. You can place your order with your grocery store in advance. You can specify your fillings: raspberry, lemon, custard, apple, prune, etc. It is virtually guaranteed that you can go to lab and someone will have brought them in (usually the person who brings the beer for lab picnics and such.)

There are NO PACZKIS in St. Louis this time of year. Or any time of year. I bought some last year, but I only found a place that sold them after emailing the damn Polish Association of St. Louis or some crazy thing like that. The place they directed me to was about 45 minutes from my house. But I went, and got a dozen. They were small! Like REGULAR FILLED DONUTS. It was very sad. They did NOT look like the pictures on Wikipedia.

So when I saw these red and white boxes, I called my friend in Kansas and asked her if they had them there, because I was thinking of buying one of these sad little boxes and bringing it when I go visit her this weekend. She asked her carpool friends if they had paczkis in Kansas. Nope. They do not even know what they are.

So that got me thinking today about what regional specialties I've been exposed to. So far, here's my list:

Michigan

• Paczkis

The South

• Really nice Christmas decorations on houses. I cannot tell you how much it bothers me when people decorate the OUTSIDES, i.e. the PUBLIC parts of their property with like one string of small white lights and one string of jumbo multicolored lights. I am vomiting a little in my mouth just thinking about it. Where we used to live, there was a Bow Lady. You had to call her to order your bows. She made beautiful wreaths and garlands with nicely matched, broad ribbons on them that you could hang along your porch, porch lights, front door, etc. It was very classy and coordinated.
  
• Luminaries. This kind of falls under the Christmas decoration, but it was for our whole neighborhood. You had to buy white paper bags for every yard or so of your curb. Then you filled those with some sand to weight them down, and put in little tealights to light up the bag. The whole neighborhood, again, had to do this and it was really pretty. Presumably the 1 Jewish family in the 300-family neighborhood played along.
  

St. Louis

• Umm.....yeah.

So that's all I can really think of right now, but I'm sure there's more. At least for Michigan and the South...