last night, september 29th, was our “pounding” for our two newlywed couples – jessica & matt and alan & rebecca. a pounding is an early american tradition of getting newlyweds started with their houses. everybody who comes to the “pounding” brings a pound of household necessities – flour, sugar, toliet paper, etc. the idea behind this is that you help them out with the necessities and then they can spend their actual money on other things.
the most difficult part of the whole thing was keeping people from mistakenly telling alan, rebeccea, jessica, or matt. we’ve been setting this thing up for about three weeks – announcing it when neither alan nor jessica or their spouses were around. this means that around 150 people knew about this thing (not including parents which would have made it even more). ever time i announced the “pounding” i tried to stress that we had to keep this on the “down low.” afterall, “lose lips sink ships.” i was sure that someone was going to make a mistake and mentioned to the wrong person. last night finally came and i truly believe that they were surprised. i could not believe that we were able to convince that many people to keep their mouths shut for 2 1/2 weeks.
just for the fun of it i would like to list what some of our teens thought “necessities” were (remember you are supposed to bring things to the “pounding” that are necessary for daily living):
- a pint of charcoal lighter fluid
- 18 rolls of toliet paper
- a 1 gallon can of van camp’s beans
- exactly one pound of tabasco sauce
- 8 boxes of macaroni & cheese
- more romin noodles than you can shake a stick at