Thanksgiving Celebrations

This is how most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. Since it is both a big family holiday and an eating holiday, decisions must be made about who will host the dinner and who will be cooking and what. We travel. We eat until we can hold no more. This year, we are having two Thanksgivings. On Saturday, we drove to Georgia (about 150mi/300km, 2.5 hours, but whose counting?) to have our first Thanksgiving with my mother-in-law. This was easy because she was eager to have the dinner at her house and to do all of the cooking, so we didn’t have to do anything except show up and eat. On the way to Georgia, we passed through Clemson, SC, home of the Clemson University Tigers football team. Saturdays in the Fall are big days for college football games, and football is a rather important part of Thanksgiving for some. While Thomas pumped the gas, Bram and I wandered over to buy a bag of boiled peanuts from a man who was boiling them in a giant pot as big as those plastic tubs that they have the carp in at Christmas in Brno. The most important thing you need to know about boiled peanuts is that they taste really good and that the correct pronunciation involves not really making that /i/ sound.
The second Thanksgiving we will have will be in South Georgia in a tiny town called Lumber City. It is where my mother went to high school, where her sisters grew up, and where one of my aunts will be hosting us at her newly acquired hurricane refuge house. A hurricane refuge house is a home that some people on the coast have so that when they evacuate for a storm, they have a place to go to. Since my aunt has quite a lot of pets, not all of whom get along with each other, this a good thing. My mother, her sisters and I will do all of the cooking. There will be turkey and dressing and potatoes and turnips and pumpkin pie, and whatever else we decide to cook. At any rate, it will be too much food. It always is. The menfolk will sit around and talk and wait for us to order them around. After we set the table and tell God thank you, we will eat ourselves silly, which for me isn't very far. I have already told you that this a big family holiday. That means that most Americans travel for this holiday and that they spend time with family, usually lots of family, family that a lot of people might admit they are thankful to have to see only once a year. That won't be the case for me. I love my parents and my aunts. They adore me. What's not to be grateful for in that?

Distractions: A Photo Post

I sat down at the computer to write a post, and this is what I saw.
I tried really hard to think about what I was writing, but these guys were digging this HUGE hole in my front yard. As if the drought hadn't done enough damage to the grass.

I got tired of trying to write with the distraction, and the workers, went to lunch, so I did the only natural thing.
I went outside and played around on their equipment. Darn! No keys.

Thanksgiving 1

Thanksgiving this year is November 22nd. It is always the fourth Thursday of November.

All Americans know the story of Thanksgiving. Pilgrims who came to this country to escape religious persecution in England managed to make it through their first hard winter and to gather a bountiful Fall harvest. To celebrate their good fortune at having arrived here and survived, they held a great feast to thank God and the Native Americans without whose help such survival and good eating might not have been possible. At this feast was served turkey, corn, potatoes, turnips, and pumpkins—the food available to them. As the story goes, after three days of feasting at one such celebration, the Indians disappeared into the woods and returned with five deer, which they gave to the governor. This was sometime around 1621.
Later, of course, the White Man slaughtered as many of the natives as possible, bought Manhattan from them for a box of beads, drove them onto reservations where in the 20th century these seemingly worthless lands were discovered to have such riches as plutonium and oil, and to be so fortuitously placed as to make some of the most profitable gambling casinos in the country. I am sure that there is a team of lawyers somewhere trying to take back those lands and their profits.
But I digress. I have always wondered why the Indians went out to get the deer and why it is that venison, the meat from deer, has never caught on as traditional Thanksgiving fare. Were the natives tired of turkey? We get tired of it. Did the food run out? Did one of the Pilgrims say something about who brought what? It isn’t as though deer has nothing to do with Thanksgiving these days. I mean, deer has as much to do with Thanksgiving as American football does. While quite a lot of men leave the feast table to go sit in front of a television to watch football, I think there may be just as many who don hunting vests and grab their rifles before walking off into the woods to shoot a doe. Doe season (the right to kill a female deer) usually opens on Thanksgiving or the day after. Maybe it is just a Southern thing. If that is the case, does that mean that Southerners are more traditional in their celebration of Thanksgiving? After all, when a Rebel comes out of the woods with a deer, somebody cooks it, and somebody eats it.

Cada Dia, Estoy Más Aquí de Allí (Every day, I am more here than there)

The primary advantage to living in another country for a year (or longer, God I wish it had been longer) is that it forces you out of yourself and in doing so cures you of a kind of blindness. There is, for example, a spectacular view of hills which I had been driving past for seven or eight years and had never seen because I never looked up until I returned from Brno. As I drove that stretch of road, I was always watching the road, thinking about where I was going and what I had to do. For the longest time after we returned from Czechia, I was constantly aware of what my world must look like to a stranger. To be honest, I had always hated living in this town; I thought it ugly and the people most unpleasingly provincial. It is only in perceiving home as as strange culture that I began to really see some beauty in it. Last fall, the trees with their changing leaves were so vibrant that I wept for the intensity of the colors, just as I had wept at the beauty of the Czech countryside.

And this fall, though the weather forecasters promised only brown trees, there is once again such intensity of color that it is a real sensuous experience for me. I look at the colors, the chartreuse, alizarin, crimson, yellow ocre, burnt umber--pure color in the tree leaves and it positively takes my breath away. Everyone always says that the sun on such trees sets them ablaze, that they are like fire, and so they are, fires of pure color, waving, vibrating pigment. It is quite a change from the fall I knew in Brno where I learned to see and appreciate the the greys, the whites, the blacks, the silvers against the cerulean and cobalt skies of deep fall and an epic winter, and the very different quality of sound there. Though sounds are softer here because they are muffled by trees and by buildings framed in wood, I miss the clear, taught quality of sound and the sounds of my old home. I miss the church bells, the many sounds of the tramvays, the sounds of another language around me. It's just that now it seems I am more here than there; I am still not sure that I like it. In Brno, I was always "más aquí de allí". Here, it is a new experience for me. So I was wondering, do you know the movie,"The Wizard of Oz"? Have you any ruby slippers you might lend me?

City, Snow, Mountains, Desert

There are words in the English language which no one should be allowed to use in any ordinary context. These words are awesome, magnificent, glorious, astonishing, breathtaking. And so are these places. Last week we spent five days out West. I have wanted to see the landscapes of the West firsthand since the first time I ever saw a cowboy movie. Of course, the cowboy movies I saw were probably actually filmed in Italy, but maybe not. I was hoping to see something very different from the natural world I know, and I was not disappointed.
We arrived in Denver on Halloween, and saw not one sign of Halloween once we left the airport, where most of the airline employees had made rather lame efforts to be in costume. One flight attendant was wearing what looked like an orange potholder on her head; I think her intention was to be a pumpkin, but she hadn't the clothing or the body for it since, unlike most Americans, she was not yet thirty kilograms or more overweight. They might just as well have worn no costumes and been their usual selves. That would have been quite scary enough.
We spent Thursday in Denver, touring the U.S. Mint, the State Capitol building, and the Colorado History Museum. What we were all struck by was the effort and expense that were put into making the capitol and mint buildings such beautiful places. Looking at the marble and onyx walls, the brass drinking fountains and etched elevator doors that looked like the Baptistry doors in Florence, the half ton chandeliers, the hand carved white oak, Thomas and I breathed to each other, "It's like the churches and castles in Europe!" Except that here, ownership is an issue, and a democratic one, at that. Both of our tour guides made a point of reminding us that these buildings belong to the people. Edna, the capitol doscent wasn't happpy until she was sure that every child in the school group we joined for our tour could tell her that there are 6 million citizens of Colorado and that each and every one has a stake that building, and that it is the people who make the government and not the other way around. Until I go into such places here (state buildings and banks, for example), I usually walk around thinking about what poor aesthetic sense we Americans have, and how we lack any appreciation for the grand. After all, we have no castles, only few cathedrals. It is our banks and official buildings that seem to merit such effort because it is an iconic show of the priorities of a democratic, capitalist country.
In contrast, what the Colorado History Museum presented in its exhibitions were the every day lives and struggles of the people and peoples who lived or suffered for the self-reliant ideal of America. Unlike the capitol and the palace-like banks, their homes and lives glittered more with dreams than brass and crystal chandeliers and marbled walls. Interestingly, nearly all of this museum was underground, as if deliberate effort had been made to avoid the grand and palacial.
On Saturday, we saw the truly grand. Thomas drove us more than 400 miles to Utah to just outside of Dinosaur National Monument. Bram was of course thrilled with the park. We hiked and climbed to dizzying heights. We saw petroglyphs and pictographs (So this was art in America before the Middle Ages!) and all around us were real honest-to-God dinosuar fossils in the rock, and beautiful tiny gemstones on the sand. We stayed in a pension (here we call it a bed and breakfast) just outside of the park. One major difference seems to be that in a bed and breakfast, part of the 'fee' includes mandatory socializing with the owner. I never did get the courage to speak Spanish with her, though her cat, Tito seemed to understand me just fine. On Saturday, Thomas drove the long way back to Denver, through Flaming Gorge Utah and Wyoming and yet more awesome, magnificent, glorious, astonishing, breathtaking country.

Halloween: It Really is About the Candy

Let's face it. While there are all kinds of interesting stories (okay, maybe only a few) about Halloween and its icons, Halloween is really and truly a candy holiday. When I was a child, we rarely got candy, and we never ever got as much as we did going trick-or-treating at Halloween. It was my favorite holiday because it combined my two most favorite things; dressing up and getting candy. It was almost magical, the power a child has over adults (and strangers at that) at Halloween. You knock on the door, and when the person answers it, you say three words--3! words-- "trick-or-treat" and you got candy. If you were smart, you could really work this grif. And we were smart, employing double bagging and on occasion, double costumes, to get extra.
Our average haul was a third to a half of what was then known as a "grocery bag". You can see it in the photo here. The wine has nothing to do with Halloween or candy (except that maybe now wine is my candy); the bottle is there to show you the size of the bag. The candy in front of it is what is left of Bram's haul (nothing compared to what we used to get, but then, he gets candy all of the time). The candy in the dish is what is known as candy corn. Hmmmm candy corn. First of all, there is nothing in Europe as cloyingly sweet to compare it to. Perhaps if you tried to imagine a jam with much too much sugar, cooked too long and sweetened with honey, too, you could get an idea of it. Anyway, candy corn is a seasonal candy; you know what that is. It is like those little brambory shaped marzapan candies you can get in Brno only around Advent, for Mikulaš Day.

To get an idea of just how big a holiday Halloween is here, think about these statistics from the National Retail Federation (who knew there was such a thing?)
This year, 58% of consumers will celebrate Halloween. They are expected to spend an estimated 5.1 billion US dollars on candy, decorations and costumes. For each of these consumers that is an average of $64.82 ($27 on decorations, $19 on candy, and $23 on costumes). Another third of a billion dollars will go for greeting cards. 7.4 million Americans will also dress their pets in costumes. And here is the real shocker: Halloween is only the sixth largest spending holiday in the US! As Markéta would say, "It's enough."