Stairway To Heaven

To be honest, this cake wasn’t much of a challenge to make. Alternating squares of red and white don’t make for a fascinating design, and you can’t take a whole lot of liberties with a classic game such as Snakes and Ladders (or as you Americans among us call it, Chutes and Ladders).

Come to think of it, why does the game go by a different name in the U.S.? Well, it seems there’s actually an interesting history, and one that is surprisingly – but unintentionally – apt for this time of year.

According to Wikipedia:

“Snakes and Ladders is an ancient game that originated in India. It was associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destiny and desire. The board was covered with symbolic images, the top featuring gods, angels, and majestic beings, while the rest of the board was covered with pictures of animals, flowers and people. The ladders represented virtues such as generosity, faith, and humility, while the snakes represented vices such as lust, anger, murder, and theft. The morality lesson of the game was that a person can attain salvation through doing good, whereas by doing evil one will inherit rebirth to lower forms of life. The number of ladders was less than the number of snakes as a reminder that a path of good is much more difficult to tread than a path of sins. Presumably, reaching the last square (number 100) represented the attainment of spiritual liberation.

When the game was brought to England, the Indian virtues and vices were replaced by English ones in hopes of better reflecting Victorian doctrines of morality. Squares of Fulfillment, Grace and Success were accessible by ladders of Thrift, Penitence and Industry and snakes of Indulgence, Disobedience and Indolence caused one to end up in Illness, Disgrace and Poverty. While the Indian version of the game had snakes outnumbering ladders, the English counterpart was more forgiving as it contained each in the same amount. This concept of equality signifies the cultural ideal that for every sin one commits, there exists another chance at redemption.

The most widely known edition of Snakes and Ladders in the United States is Chutes and Ladders released by Milton Bradley in 1943. The playground setting replaced the snakes, which were received negatively by children at the time. The theme of the board design is playground equipment, showing children climbing ladders and descending chutes. The artwork on the board teaches a morality lesson, the squares on the bottom of the ladders show a child doing a good or sensible deed and at the top of the ladder there is an image of the child enjoying the reward. At the top of the chutes, there are pictures of children engaging in mischievous or foolish behaviour and the images on the bottom show the child suffering the consequences.”

Bottom line? It’s not as mindless and tedious (OK, well it’s still tedious) a game as I always imagined it to be.