Breakfast - a Time or a Menu?

This comic strip reminded me - a few weeks ago, we ate the evening meal (sometimes dinner, sometimes supper, around here) at a Baker's Square restaurant. I mentioned that I had been thinking about pancakes for a couple of weeks so I thought I might order them.

I received some disbelieving looks from my dinner companions -- at least, from the ones who were not in my immediate family. "Really? Pancakes? For dinner?"

I guess we're weird. We've had pancakes, and waffles, and eggs, as "dinner" entrees quite often in our family. In fact, I'm quite sure my we did the same thing when I was growing up. This does not seem unusual to us, but we get skeptical reactions from most people when they find this out about us. [Imagine! How unconventional! Scandalous, I tell you.]

I wonder how these traditions get started, and then turn into conventions, and then even into expectations.

Part of the reason, I'm sure, is the dichotomy of "morning people" and "late night people."

We're "late night people" in our family. [OK, not so much Sarah anymore -- she has to be up so early to teach -- but if left to her own devices, who knows....] School-day mornings were timed to the last second, with an efficiency that would never have been possible if a meal needed to be cooked, served and consumed. [To this day, my "breakfast" is a small, plastic kiddy glass {left over from a Bible School in the '90's} filled with a high-fiber breakfast cereal. {Who has time for sitting down and eating?}] Weekend "mornings" completely disappeared for our kids most of the time, especially once they reached double-digits in age. We had to wake some of them up for lunch, for goodness sake [and a certain teenage son of mine was quite often unhappy about being woken up that early.] If we never ate pancakes except at "breakfast" we'd never have eaten pancakes!

I really don't think we are so strange. We just recognize that a food that is good at 6:00 AM is equally delicious at 6:00 PM. And, you're awake to enjoy it!

So don't look at me so funny when I want pancakes for dinner.

[And I won't mention our habit of having popcorn for dinner sometimes. As the entree. With a homemade shake or smoothie as the drink. Yummmmm.]