Island holiday

Several families gathered to celebrate Thanksgiving with L & D on Vashon. It's unusually warm weather for late November/early December, so an afternoon walk was a pleasure. Their nearest neighbor has turned much of his acreage into a park, where we were welcome to visit. An authentic Thai temple is one of the most interesting features.



Old millstones make wonderful steppingstones through a wetland.


Best description of the new house - "The three-car garage and caretaker's quarters for a five-bedroom mansion that never got built." But the main room accommodated 11 around a festive table.

Happy Thanksgiving!

If this were Facebook, the first line would be "Julie wishes everyone a happy Thanksgiving."

What I'm really wondering is if the two friends who are spending the holiday in New York City went to the Macy's parade. Reports on NPR this morning made it sound fun, colorful - and cold!

Here we have a light gray day, with the sun working hard to break through. "Light gray" is a term I borrowed from a long-ago workmate, whose children (raised on the sunny side of the Cascades) informed her that there were three kinds of days in Puget Sound - light gray, medium gray and dark gray. It's an efficient way to sum up the weather, especially in winter, although this year we've had more sunny November weekends than usual.

Later today a neighbor and I are headed for the Edmonds ferry, to join friends in Kingston for dinner. On Saturday, L is cooking dinner for everyone at their new house on Vashon. Today she gets a welcome holiday from major food preparation because the restaurant is closed and they plan to spend the day quietly.

Last night I made two different recipes of Liptauer cheese, as contributions for various Thanksgiving feasts. Radio news was 90% Mumbai disasaters (BBC World Service, thanks to HD radio) with some amazing on-the-spot reports from reporters and survivors.

One businessman who lives in Mumbai said security around the Taj Mahal hotel had been noticeably increased in the past few weeks. When my brother visited India with a group last month, their original plan was to work part of the time in Mumbai. However, after a quick sightseeing visit, local contacts moved them quickly to a smaller city, explaining that Mumbai was not very safe.

Thinking about travel, and holidays

On a travel blog I follow, a recent thread was, "If you could go right now..."

Answers ranged from walking in Italy to a weekend in Las Vegas to Christmas markets in Europe.

I would probably have chosen Paris, since I was there last November. Today I even found this picture (blurry, but evocative) of the 2007 Christmas lights on the Champs Elysees.



This is the view from any bus crossing top of the boulevard, near the Arc de Triomphe. The hanging blue lights were long tubes, that contrasted with thousands of tiny white lights wrapped around tree trunks and branches. At the far end of the grand boulevard a tall Ferris wheel glittered on the Place de la Concorde.

Northern Europe has long dark evenings this time of year, but Christmas lights begin going up as soon as the All Saints/All Souls holidays are over. No Thanksgiving turkey to get in the way.

There are plenty of places a homesick American can find a traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Paris (biggest one is the celebration at the American Church) but I was quite content with roast lamb at the local bistro. Although I like Thanksgiving, I have never been locked into a prescribed celebration.

My Canadian parents never fully accepted a late November celebration of a holiday they had always observed in October. "Turkey is for Christmas," my mother said - so we sometimes had pheasant or ham.

My husband had no desire to replicate his family's traditional Midwestern Thanksgivings, so our celebrations varied widely. Sometimes we went to the movies before dinner, sometimes we were at Vashon, sometimes we gathered with other families.

The Thanksgiving everyone remembers most fondly was the year we took Chinese takeout to Makapu'u Beach on Oahu, sitting on the rocks to eat after a couple of hours of swimming and body-surfing. Hawaii was digging out from the first hurricane in many years, and on the way to the beach we passed more than one family making a barbecue Thanksgiving in the yard of a roofless house. The sun was shining, the water was warm, electricity was on for most of the time - all good reasons to celebrate.

I like Thanksgiving in Transylvania, which falls the last weekend in September. It's a harvest festival, celebrated in church, and one of only four times a year that Transylvanian Unitarian churches include communion in their service. Afterwards everyone gathers for a dinner that, if you're lucky, will consist mostly of food grown locally.