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Archive for the ‘Home Living’ Category

The bathroom is the most enigmatic of rooms, riddled with ancient and contemporary ritual. It is connected with cultural superstitions as well. According to the Celts, for whom water represented a reunion with the womb, a few silver coins in the bath ensured good luck. Adding the first snow of winter to the bath brought good health. Sage wisdom has it that roses in the bath bring love; lavender, happiness; rosemary; creativity; peppermint, revivification; and eucalyptus, freedom from pain. A recipe for romance calls for oranges and fresh mint leaves added to the bath and rubbed on the body—then allowed to air-dry Do you want beauty? Would you be willing to go to the extremes Cleopatra did? She is said to have bathed regularly in asses’ milk.
Bathing involves a religious significance in many cultures. For Muslims and Jews it is associated with purification and holiness. The complex bathing rituals of the Japanese are meant to facilitate mental clarity. Instead of seeing bathing as just a way to get clean like we do in the West, Eastern cultures get clean in separate quarters so that they can bathe. For Native Americans sweat lodges are used to facilitate healing of illness (everything from influenza to pleurisy) as well as to revitalize racial identity In Finland the sauna is a national institution. It is said that prior to the 1990s there were more saunas than cars in that country.

In Russia the bania, or sauna, once included intimate family rituals. A bride, on the day before her wedding, was taken for a sweat bath. Her sweat was collected by pouring milk over her body and catching it in a bowl. The milk was mixed with flour to make a dough. The dough was plastered all over her while she completed her bath, then scraped off and kneaded to make bread for the marriage feast. Childbirth often took place in the bania as well. Following a funeral, families gathered not in the dining room for a meal together but in the bania to grieve.
In Scandinavia communal bathing in a sauna involves nudity that is as neighborly as a potluck supper. As an American living on a tiny out-of-the-way island in Denmark, the thought of bathing with the postman who lived down the street wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. But when the opportunity arose, I jumped right in with my friends just for the experience. Now that I live in Oregon, a hike to one of the many natural hot springs along theCascade mountain range can mean bathing nude without company.
My favorite bath of all time was around a large vat of muddy black clay at the Dead Sea. The salts and minerals in the clay bring a tingling sensation. I had plastered it on thick and relaxed in the sun—a multitude of chairs are available—allowing it to dry completely. The point is to take time rinsing off in one of the many outdoor showers because the sticky mud adheres between teeth, in hair, and under armpits. Trying to get it all off brings laughter to last a lifetime.
Back in downtown Jerusalem, I visited the Turkish baths more than once because the environment simply fascinated me. Here plump-and-proud-of-it naked women sit on long benches in a large, steamy, mist-filled room. Children in tow, the robust women scrub little ears and backsides and shampoo each other’s dark hair. Showers along the walls constantly turn on and off as women wash, gab, sweat, and shower again and again. The baths are a place to socialize and gossip, for here “the echo repeats every word thrice.”
Mikkel Aaland, an expert on cultural bathing rituals and history says Turkish baths recompensed Middle Eastern women for amusements enjoyed by proletarian European women. Historically the domain of Muslim men, they eventually became the social gathering place for wives.’

For Americans, whose homes include more bathtubs per capita than any other nation, bathing is most simply a ritual of necessity and at times relaxation. In contrast to global practice, Americans bathe daily, the ultimate luxury for anyone almost anywhere else in the world.
In the modest bungalow where I grew up, we children were bathed in an old-fashioned claw-foot tub. I was introduced to the rare shower in our basement where in one corner a plastic curtain created a cubicle around a wooden slatted platform. This shower was primitive and dark, but I relished the sense of my mother’s pleasure while she washed her hair, then mine under gushing torrents of water.
When we moved to California, the Golden State, the bathroom in our pink stucco house held a special perk: a ceiling sunlamp where damp became dry instantaneously. Raising a family of my own, there were a variety of bathrooms, each different yet familial. Bubble-gum-scented bubble soap and shiny Cinderella shampoo sat alongside a metal diaper pail with its Clorox odor (ah, what I would have given for a Diaper Genie!).
Today’s dream bath has become the home spa, where high- end packaging is key. The French design and sophisticated fonts used on labels, nostalgic apothecary-shaped bottles and jars, and pale, whispery colors drive the market. Huge companies like Bath & Body Works and a proliferation of private online businesses cater to a woman’s craving to be pampered. The bathroom, after all, is the one place where a woman is likely to think about only herself; and this is the solution to a stress-induced culture driven by Herculean expectations that a woman be there for all people at all times.