June 22, 2017 (Thursday)
Today is National Chocolate Eclair Day. What a wonderful idea.
When I was in the sixth grade, a family moved to our town and the daughter began attending our school. She was in my class. She immediately became very popular after we learned that her family owned a candy store which also sold baked sweets. Somebody always wanted to walk her home on the chance that her family might offer him candy.
One day her parents invited our entire class to the store and gave each of us a treat. Mine was a chocolate eclair. It was the first time in my life I had ever heard of that and, of course, the first time I ever tasted one. Oh, my, how good it was!
The year was 1942, and sugar was scarce due to WW2, so I’m sure the candy business was making adjustments, probably using substitutes for ordinary sweeteners. Whatever was being done did not keep us from enjoying whatever was made available to us.
An eclair is shaped sort of like a hot dog, but there the similarity ends. It is made with light, fluffy dough filled with a variety of creams and custards and topped with icing. The word, eclair, comes from French éclair ‘flash of lightning’, so named because it is eaten quickly (in a flash), or so it is said.
The Bible speaks of sweet things. Samson, a judge in the Bible known for his physical strength, devised a puzzle using the word, “sweet,” to confound his enemies. (It was honey he was describing). Nehemiah spoke of “sweet drinks.” The psalmist wrote that God’s word is “sweeter than honey.” The girl in Song of Solomon brags on her sweetheart that he is like a tree whose apples are sweet. Isaiah called for truth in labeling when he cautioned his hearers not to call bitter stuff “sweet.” Proverbs declares, “Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”
I remember when I graduated from high school, our church gave the graduates a dinner. The speaker was Vice President at East Texas Baptist College, and he advised us to “be sweet.” Reminding us that we were in the process of becoming, and to be careful to become pleasing to God, he told us, “be sweet.” The world would be a better place if all of us who claim to know God would “be sweet.”