Not everyone grew up with a mother who’s a Utah celebrity, TV chef, author, motivational speaker, and creator of a world-renowned catering company. To the rest of the world, our mother, Mary Crafts (a.k.a. Mary Crafts-Homer), is the unstoppable force who built Culinary Crafts from the ground up, but first and foremost, she was “Mom” to us.
This Mother’s Day, we are looking back at some of the life-changing lessons we learned from our mother.
Ryan
I would say that our mom taught us what excellence—true excellence—looks like.
It’s not about never making mistakes. In fact, if you’re afraid to ever make a mistake, you won’t put yourself out there and try new things, fail, learn from your mistakes, and try again. That’s how growth happens. That’s how innovations are made. And that process—reach, stumble, adjust, learn, reach again—done over and over and over for years on end until you are miles ahead of where you started and ahead of the competition who has played it “safe”…that’s what excellence is.
I think that when people see our mom win awards and be recognized for her achievements by world leaders in the catering and hospitality industry, it may be impossible for them to imagine where Mary Crafts was when she started her journey. The truth is, Mom had to learn by trial and error virtually every step of the way. When she and Dad launched Culinary Crafts back in 1984, they had zero catering experience. They were unemployed, their car had been repossessed, their house was in foreclosure, and they were just desperate to take care of their kids. To this day, I am amazed at the audacity and courage it took, under those circumstances, to launch a business (and a catering company in Utah County no less)!
So yeah, watching our mom leap into the unknown, crash-land on the rocks of reality, pick herself up, and leap again and again…that made quiet an impression on me. It taught me to judge myself on a standard of true excellence, not in comparison to how other people were doing but by asking, “What have I learned from this experience? How can I be better? What can I try next?”
Kaleb
Our Company Vision is “Sharing the Joy of Hospitality,” and that’s an ethic we learned from Mom.
When we were kids, every Halloween our mother used to hand out king-size candy bars at our door. (This was back when no one gave kids that much chocolate—for heaven’s sake, are we trying to make them sick?) She would fan out the chocolate in a beautiful display on a silver serving tray, and then she’d lean down and present the tray to each little witch or toilet paper mummy one at a time as if she were serving royalty. The happiness in her smile made every kid feel like the display had been made especially for them.
That’s what hospitality should feel like, and that’s how Mom made people feel. That’s the “joy” part in “Sharing the Joy of Hospitality.” That smile for each person she served was absolutely real. You can’t fake it. I mean, sure, anyone can hand out chocolate bars and smile. But when bringing enjoyment to other people genuinely makes you happy too, people can tell.
That’s why, when I see our Company Vision, I’m reminded of Mom. She radiated the joy of bringing joy to others. She treated people better than they ever expected to be treated, and she loved doing it. Don’t get me wrong, she also worked her fingers to the bone doing it! But you could see how much she loved making and serving great food because she loved the people she did it for. I will always be grateful to her for teaching us the joy of hospitality.
Meagan
Gosh, I can only talk about one thing our mom taught us? Okay, well, I guess the lesson I value most is the importance of preparing and sharing good food together.
In our American fast food, DoorDash culture where most people can barely squeak out enough time to sit down and eat together, our family was an anomaly. We always cooked and ate together. I was in the kitchen with my parents and brothers from the time I could hold a knife (under Mom’s careful supervision, of course). Meals were family events, and holidays were huge. In fact, we often had extended family, neighbors, and even strangers at our table.
I remember one year when we had two large families join us for our Thanksgiving feast, and Mom decided to stuff the turkey. People forget that Mom wasn’t a cooking genius when she started out, so sometimes she made mistakes. She didn’t realize that stuffing a large turkey will greatly increase the cooking time. Hours and hours went by, and the bird wasn’t even close to done. Luckily, Dad had made 14 different kinds of pie, so we decided to start with dessert. When it finally finished cooking, the turkey wasn’t the only thing that was stuffed!
Experiences like that taught me a lot of lessons. I learned:
- Don’t’ panic; we’ll be fine.
- It’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them.
- Work with what you have instead of obsessing over what you don’t have.
- Don’t lose sight of the fact that the reason for holidays, traditions, and the food we make is to create memories with the people we love. When things go off track, that can lead to even better memories.
- But the holidays may not be the best time for testing out new recipes.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the beautiful, amazing, nurturing, learning, imperfect people in our lives. And especially, to you, Mary Crafts, all our appreciation and love.
Meagan, Kaleb, and Ryan Crafts
