Covid 19

After our parents passed away in 2017, Christmas as we’d always known it drastically changed.  Three of my siblings live out-of-state, and it’s understandable that visiting our parents during the holidays was their priority.  However, after their passing, the sibs made the decision to come to Nebraska every other year instead.

The four of us in Omaha still get together on the off-years, but we celebrate on a lower scale.  However, in the BIG Christmas year when all seven of us, including nieces and nephews, come together, Christmas planning explodes, and we celebrate from Christmas Eve until the 29th.  It’s a lot of cooking, groceries, cleaning, etc., but it’s great fun and makes for some great memories.  Did I mention there are 63 of us?  🙂

This year was the BIG Christmas, and the event started out with pizza and a super fun game of Spoons at my sister’s house on the 26th.  Then, there was my nephew’s Eagle Scout Court of Honor on the 27th, and the day-long cooking it entailed for the dinner that night – my grandmother’s meatballs, guiteruni (no one knows how to spell it), made-from-scratch spaghetti sauce, homemade Italian sausage, and so on, enough to feed the crowd in attendance.  If that wasn’t fun enough, we also celebrated my youngest sister’s 50th birthday that night.

We were off to a roaring start for the week, until my Texas niece called the next day to tell me her husband tested positive for Covid.

Oh, boy.

Evidently, their Texas grandmother had tested positive after they spent Christmas Eve with her, and yep, Covid spread like wildfire here in Nebraska.  If family members weren’t sick, they were afraid they would be, and with little ones to think of, our numbers dropped a bunch.

But the rest of us defied the virus and celebrated.  There were a few who took the virus home with them after the festivities ended, including my husband.  He didn’t officially test, but he had all the symptoms, and I’d be surprised if he wasn’t suffering from the virus.

As I write this, he is on his fifth day of coughing.  (I have somehow managed to elude capture by Covid.)  He’s not one to run to the doctor, and I think since it’s viral, you just have to tough it out anyway, especially when he’s had all the shots and boosters.

So how did our ancestors treat their coughs?

Amazingly, cough drops have been around since 1000 B.C..  Egyptian confectioners developed the first hard candies to soothe that coughing reflex, using honey and various herbs, citrus fruits, and spices to make them palatable.  Recipes evolved throughout the centuries, but it was in the 1800’s that physicians discovered that opiates depressed the brain’s cough reflex, and since they worked well, and were readily available, patients bought them in droves.  Physicians became aware of the dangers of addiction by their patients (um, yeah!) and the opiate varieties were relegated to the super-sick.

Enter the Smith Brothers, sons of a candy maker in New York in the mid-1800s.  When a customer in need of cash offered what he claimed was an effective cough remedy to their father, James Smith, he was paid $5, and the elder went home, made use of his candy-making skills, and produced a sweet, hard piece of medicine candy, which he generously dispersed to friends and family afflicted with coughs and colds.  Word spread of the lozenges’ effectiveness. The brothers, William and Andrew, advertised their trademark images at first on large glass bowls on drugstore counters where the lozenges were distributed, and later to the cardboard boxes we all know today.  By the way, the man on the left with the short beard and nicknamed “Trade” is William, the long-bearded brother, “Mark,” is Andrew.  Their father died in 1866, and the brothers grew the cough drop business from sales of five pounds a day to five TONS a day.

I love fun stories like this, don’t you?

Not long after, in 1881, William Luden developed the first menthol cough drop. To help his marketing, he passed out samples of his cough drops to workers on the Reading Railroad, where they spread word of his product throughout the network.  In another show of marketing genius, retailers displayed and sold his boxed lozenges directly in their stores, saving Luden from selling door-to-door as was the norm at the time.  He developed a new way of packaging his lozenges by lining the handy boxes with wax paper to extend their shelf life.

Luden’s Wild Cherry cough drops were my favorite as a little girl.  I totally remember those little boxes lined in wax paper, don’t you?  And that narrow strip of red that helped open the package!

Have you had Covid?  (Who hasn’t, right?) 

What’s your best remedy for a cold or a sore throat?