Life In The Fastnacht Lane

Happy Fastnacht Day! For those of you who don't what it is, Fastnacht Day is generally a Pennsylvania Dutch thang, and is the day before Lent starts, with it's historical roots going back to Germany. (AKA "Fat Tuesday" for my Mardi Gras peeps.) Fastnacht literally means donut, so the day before Lent (the day you begin fasting), people would rid their kitchens and pantries of the things to be given up for Lent- most often sugar and fats (lard) were kicked to the curb. So in a rush to get their last kicks in, deep-fried donuts were made and scarfed down on tuesday.

I'm sure there's a lot more to it than my pathetic little explanation, but this is what I remember from being a kid, when my Mom would make homemade donuts in an electric deep fryer that sat on the counter and I swear to all things holy they were the best damn donuts I ever ate in my whole entire life. (Screw you Krispy Kreme, you ain't got nothin' on lard-fried donuts in a 1970's deep fat fryer!) I could Google the background of Fastnacht Day, but that just means, like, effort and fact-checking, and that's just not how we roll around here. So the details are a bit sketchy and incomplete. But whatevs. Any excuse to eat donuts is fine with me! And if you don't eat at least one donut today, the terrorists win.


I wasn't even planning on looking for any donut-themed vintage to share, because when have you ever in your whole life seen any 50's donut novelty print dresses laying around? That's right, homies- never. But shock and surprise, while it's not exactly a to-die dress, I did find this cutesy little Vintage 50's Doughnut Ladies Folksy Table Runner, currently available on Etsy.



The pictures are crap, but can you make out the cute, plump folksy women in their cute, folksy kitchen making cute, folksy polka-dotty donuts? Also: I swear on a stack of fastnachts I'll never use the word "folksy" again.