Thankful

Our Thanksgiving holiday just happened here yesterday -- for readers outside the United States, it's an annual celebration of food, family, and televised (American) football. This year it's also been the unfortunate victim of the capitalistic tendency to get amped up about Christmas and the Christmas shopping season, to the point where stored were open on Thanksgiving Day, a concept that would have been unheard of just a few years back. You won't find me huddling in a parking lot line, waiting to join a mob rushing for cheap TVs -- no surprise -- since we still try to keep Thanksgiving around here as sane and low-key as possible. I"ve had my share of quiet ones, and I've had my share of busy ones, where every relative and friend of the family has a plate piled high and is pushed into any available seating they can find. Both kinds are excellent, but I can't think that camping out since Wednesday night -- yes, really -- is the way to go, not even in the mild late fall weather of California. Sorry, retailers: I'm eating leftover pie this morning with a coffee and being grateful for my family.

As is traditional in our house, and in many others, we go around the table before Thursday's big meal and each say something we're thankful for. Watching my kids roll their eyes at dad's dorky traditionsis just another gift I'm giving to them, one that I hope they'll remember and continue with their own families when they're seated around their own family tables someday. I usually point out that I'm thankful for them, and for time off from work, and for not going shopping, and for my wife's excellent cranberry sauce and for pie (I tend to cut loose in the pastry-baking department.)

And of course, dear Typosphere, I'm thankful for you all. For your expertise and experience, your good humor, your scholarship, excellent photography, and general cleverness. I'm thankful for NaNoWriMo and the chance to cut loose in the creativity department (always trying to finish before the pies) and I'm always thankful for the Brigade and their goofy madness. I'm thankful that we're able to rise above and shrug off labels like "hipster" and support one another without being egotistical or exclusive about it. I'm thankful for repair shops and repair links! I'm thankful for yard sales and church basement sales and thrift stores, and am equally thankful for the strength not to bring home every orphan machine. My wife is thankful for that, too.

Normal operations should be starting up again here next month. My NaNo draft is done, my brain is relaxed, and I think work might be getting back to a more normal pace again.

Thanks

It's Thanksgiving Day today in the U.S., a national holiday dedicated to the legend of a shared meal between the early European colonists and the Native Americans who encountered them. Of course, time and selective memory have softened the truth of that first harvest season into something that's suitable for elementary school re-enactments, where the class is divided roughly into Indians and Pilgrims, and perform a make-believe feast of construction-paper food for parents and family. At least, it was recognized as such in one of my early schools. We moved to another state when I was still fairly young, one that had a deer-hunting season, so the fourth Thursday of November became less focused around making hand-print turkeys and more about the making unique fashion statement of blaze orange hunter's caps with camouflaged coveralls. Thanksgiving became an also-ran to Deer Day.

Now I'm older and more ornery, and bristling visibly at "Black Friday" sales now being superseded by stores opening on Thanksgiving day. Christmas decor is already in all the shops: it's been in place since the first of the month. I still champion the day, though, not just because of its focus on sharing a really big, home-cooked meal concluding with pie* -- well, that is a large part of the appeal -- but because it's a last day of quiet before the rush to the end of the year. This year, the calendar has aligned such that Thanksgiving is the earliest it can possibly be -- November 22. This means we effectively get an extra week to heed to the drumbeat of Christmas mania. You can imagine how I feel about that.

That drumbeat, however, is over 24 hours away. I'm writing this Wednesday evening, and I hope to be offline much of tomorrow. Tomorrow, I get up early as I have every day this month, sit at the keys and try to wring a few more pages of my novel out of my brain, and listen for the sound of my youngest sneaking into the room with the dog diligently behind her. We'll make pumpkin pie, and apple pie, and a raisin pie, and make too much noise as we mix and pour and bake and clean, and then do it all again. The Nice Dishes will come out of the cupboard, we'll wipe off the wine glasses and shake out the good napkins and prop up the hand-print turkeys my daughters make** as they wait and wait and wait for the meal to be readied, as too many people try to do too many things in our too-small kitchen. We'll sit down at last, hungry and tired and ready to eat, and then go around the table as we always do, saying what we're thankful for.***

I'm thankful for many things: things I'll share at the table, things I'll keep private in my heart.

Thanks to all of you for putting up with Rhinos and novels and all the self-indulgence that comes from keeping a blog. Thanks for being part of the Brigade, be it as a participant, or part of the cheering section, or one of the sane people watching politely from the sidelines. Thanks for being one of the nicest groups of people on the Internet, hands down. Thanks for all your scholarship, for your photo essays, for flea markets and for sharing your hobbies.

Thanks for another year, everyone. Can I get you another slice of pie?


* If it's done right, that is. Some traditions should never be lost, and the post-Thanksgiving pie coma is one of them.

** Hand-print turkeys are another tradition not to be trifled with.

*** Highly corny. You're allowed to do this. It's Thanksgiving!

You're welcome (Hope for the future, part 2)

Received in the mail on a torn sheet of paper, in a typed envelope. See this for some context.