THE BLUE LANTERN: The Feast Of The Seven Fishes

THE BLUE LANTERN: The Feast Of The Seven Fishes
Excerpt:
From southern Italy comes a Christmas Eve custom: the feast of the seven fishes. I like to imagine seven fish feasting, something a little different. Seven is said to be a lucky number but not if you are number seven on a dinner plate. As a small child in coastal Massachusetts, I would walk beside my parents along the slatted wooden piers past the lobster troughs where diners at ocean-front restaurants could select their personal dinner. They admonished me not to touch because they lobsters snapped. I remember thinking that I would, too, if I were about to be boiled alive like some unfortunate creature in a Grimm fairy tale . But I'm not. I'm a vegetarian. "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly..."