We had Bailey's Red Egg and Ginger party yesterday at our place. This is usually held when the baby is 6 weeks old, but due to two successive deaths in the family, we put it off until now, just shy of 7 months.
Basically, this is a party to introduce the new baby to the family, show them off, accept luck money on their behalf and find out what name the elders have chosen. Oh, and since this is the Chinese we're talking about, eat tons and tons of food, which must include noodles (for long life) and should include red foods (for luck) like pork and lobster. And hard-boiled eggs dyed red.
We had a good time, ate 4 metric tons of food, displayed Mr. Bailey, who was deeply interested in the shiny Mylar balloons my sister brought, and found at the end of the afternoon that Trixie had eaten NINE eggs. Four sanctioned by me, and the rest cadged from unsuspecting Other Grown-Ups unaware of the ones that came before. Talk about gaming the system! I don't know whether to be struttingly proud of her or lock her in her room until she's twenty-one.
There was some lively discussion about what Bailey's name should be, but since all the boys of his generation have "Lun" in their name, they ended up going with a basic translation of Bailey into the right characters with a roughly synonymous sound of "Bae-lun." One aunt held out for "Bok-lun" har har, but we're pretty sure she was joking.
I can remember Trixie's mother eating at least six hard-boiled eggs on an occaision in Myrtle beach. Maybe it increases by 50% with each generation.
Posted by: Sandra at June 11, 2006 09:18 AM