Fa-la-la-la-la la-la la la!

It's Thanksgiving weekend and that can mean only one thing: overeating and decorating a tree. Two things! Overeating, decorating a tree, and shopping. Three things!

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, we set up the tree. We have an artificial tree that is strung with lights. We just have to take it out of the box, put the sections on the stand and plug each section's lights into the lower lower section's line.

Jerry rearranged the family room a bit. The chaise longue portion of the sofa got moved into the bedroom and the recliners shifted into the space that that made.

Here's the newly emptied space:

Here's the first section of the tree:

And the second:

And the last section with the lights burning:

We then paused to give thanks. Jerry's cousin moved to Las Vegas so we had to start a new Thanksgiving tradition. We fixed the whole spread for just the two of us. Jerry got us a Tofurky roast (Oh, look, it's made by Turtle Island Foods! Is that cool, or what?) that was roasted with carrots from our garden. We made dressing (from cornbread made from corn we ground ourselves), mashed potatoes (well, butter with some potatoes to keep it from being too runny), green bean casserole (what Thanksgiving dinner is complete without green bean casserole?), cranberries and French Silk pie (we haven't come down with salmonella poisoning yet).

Today we stimulated the economy at the Arts 'n Crafts fair at Bates Nut Farm. Our usual post-Thanksgiving Arts Festival wasn't done this year. Shoot!

We came home and napped. Then we decorated the tree. Here's the finished tree.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

A little autumn color

My Haemanthus albiflos is blooming. It is a confused plant. It doesn't really know when to bloom. I remember that it was blooming around my birthday one year. It blooms when it wants to. It knows best.

It's got white petals (or are they bracts?) with a bunch of bright yellow stamens poking out. I gave it a bigger pot this year and I think it appreciated that. It's putting on its best show ever.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Concrete and tile stepping stone.

MLM: NOT (thank God!) Another Priest in the Family!

Peggy tells me when I was very young that I was introduced to one of our relatives on the religious side of the family. She exclaimed "Another priest in the family!" I have no idea who that was but she must have been disappointed. Religion and I never got together.

I went through the motions for a while because I didn't have much of a choice. When you are born to a Catholic parent you are raised a Catholic.

The best thing about growing up Catholic (until Vatican II changed the rules) was that I couldn't eat meat on Fridays. I got to eat more peanut butter! Yay, Friday! (Oh, my! I just checked and apparently it's a myth that Vatican II let us eat meat on Friday! Oh, well.) I went to Neil Gardner's birthday party one year that happened to be on a Friday. Mrs. Gardner served hot dogs. Later that day I realized that I had committed a mortal sin. I was terrified. I wonder if I confessed that. Was Mrs. Gardner trying to send this Catholic to hell?

One of the worst things about growing up Catholic was having to go to catechism class every week after school. Didn't they know that kids would rather play after school?

In our early years we got to memorize the answers to many questions so that we could prove to the priest that we deserved to take our First Communion. Later, we got to memorize answers to many questions to prove that we deserved to get our Confirmation. One of the things that we do when we get confirmed is take the name of a saint who is special to us. I didn't know one saint from another. (Did they teach us about saints? Did I miss that lesson?) Beth had been appalled that none of the boys in her group had taken the Archbishop's name so I took the Archbishop's name. What was the Archbishop's name?

I think that this is one of the tests I took that prepared me for confirmation. I aced it!

The catechism teacher gave me a good assessment (but she couldn't spell my name).





When she sent us off to summer vacation, she gave us a little card with reminders of what to do after we were released from her care.
There is no record of my going to mass on First Fridays or any other times. And my parent or guardian didn't attest to my fulfilling these duties. I'm off to hell.


Sometime during my catechism career, I was taken from class to be a model in a photo shoot. I have no idea what the pictures were going to be used for but I got a copy of one of them! I'm fiddling with a little model of an altar or something. How inspiring!
I'm the one on the left. I don't know who the others are. I don't know what I did to deserve this honor.

Another honor I had was to have my birthday fall on the Feast of the Ascension, a Holy Day of Obligation, a couple of times. Geez! I had to go to church on my birthday and it wasn't even a Sunday! NOT FAIR!

Around the seventh or eighth grade I somehow got to make the decision that I wasn't going to go to church anymore. How did I get to decide that? Children can't decide things like that for themselves.

Except for weddings and funerals, the last time I can remember going to church was when we visited Tucumcari and I went along to let our grandmother see that she had good grandkids following the right path.

Halloween, Christmas, Birthdays, Christmas, Christmas

Here's the third carousel of family slides. Halloween, 1955, from the second set continues. Then we see Christmas and a couple of birthdays.

Then we run into a little trouble...mostly naked little girls. They make me nervous so I blacked out a lot of them. I don't want to contribute to sick people's fantasies.

Quick update already: The naked girls make me really nervous so they're gone. If any of you grown up girls want to see yourselves in just your panties, let me know.

Then more Christmases.

We're seeing some of the line-up-an-smile! style of picture taking. And there are some pictures of kids not having a good time at Christmas.

Ah, such memories! (Well, not yet for me. I was only two and a half at the end of this set.)

Carousel-03

I want to know more about that nifty washing machine in the living room.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A tile, 3¼" square.

MLM: Taking a bye

I'm tired and won't dredge up a reminiscence this week. (Please see my three previous posts to see why I'm tuckered out.)