Re-Emergence Day

Every Re-Emergence Day, it was always the kids’ duty to sit there with a pair of kitchen shears and trim the salami slices so that they would be square. More is fair when the meat is square, they’d say. It was such a pain but did look pretty cool next to the Ritz crackers and all dressed potato chips.

I’m having trouble remembering but I think my brother also used a melon baller sometimes so the cheese on the cheese board would be spherical. Does that sound right? I also remember someone saying Luck abounds when your cheese is round.

But yeah, our little hands would cramp up for days after! I guess you can buy your stuff precut and pre-balled but my folks would always be too cheap to buy the premade platter from the grocery store. (Haven’t seen those for a few years! Anybody know what happened?)

Yeah, we also did the square salami on round Ritz crackers, and round cheese on square Premium Plus crackers. It seemed to be important that the shapes never matched. One year I cut the salami into triangles. My aunt was shocked, and refused to touch them, but others in the family just chuckled about it.

My entire childhood, I was confused why the sandwiches needed to be cut into precisely these shapes, and how this was connected to the themes of Re-Emergence Day.

A couple years ago, I was walking by a cafe that had their Re-Emergence Day decorations up (brown, white and pink), and overhead this really snobby tweed-covered guy smoking and explaining the themes of the holiday to this (maybe first date?) girl standing next to him.

I had something to do with Plato's Theory of Forms, and wanting to reverse entropy to return food to simple geometry, ie Platonic Solids, before consuming them again. He was gesturing seriously at all the pastries in the window at the time. Sandwiches, laid out just as you're describing them.
It was some philosophical nonsense I didn't understand. I think he was just trying to come off as a knowitall.

Sounds like pure nonsense to me. I think he'd just read his first philosophy book and was trying to score points with his date.
Most of these traditions happen without any deep reason. Someone started cutting shapes they liked, someone else liked it, and it spreads. You get regional differences with frilled edges, a hole in the center, or whatever, and everyone in that town swears that's the "original way", but how many "original ways" can there be?