Thursday, March 12, 2015

Spring Cleaning

As you can probably guess, I have been seriously cleaning.  I had to, once again, check out the origin of spring cleaning. I always thought it was a curse that southern women passed onto their daughters. Not so.  I could not find a definitive answer about how all this got started. However, there are some shared ideas. Some think it dates back to the Persian New Year which falls on the first day of spring. The Iranians participated in "shaking the house" cleaning everything.  Some say it goes back to  preparing the house for the Jewish celebration of Passover. Some say it goes way back when the extra light of springtime gave way to the opportunity to see the messy caves one inhabited. 
No matter where you think it might have originated, remember to spring clean your refrigerator and pantry. If there is anything hanging around that doesn't represent the practice of "clean eating", let it go! Don't keep it around just in case because there will a craving for it someday. Think about it like this. If you smoked for years and finally made the sacrifice to quit (and if you did, congratulations),
you wouldn't keep a pack of cigarettes on a shelf in the garage just in case you wanted a smoke. If you had a problem with alcohol and recovered (and again congratulations), would you keep a bottle of whatever you liked hidden in your closet just in case you needed a drink? I don't think so to either of those. (If so, somebody will find it spring cleaning.) So if a food is bad for you, let it go and don't bring it home again. As for spring cleaning, I think someday I might look up "spring cleaning" on Wikipedia and it will say "a curse that southern women passed onto their daughters"!

If you want more information about this subject, check out Wikipedia or http://www.wiseGEEK.com yourself.