December’s First Full Moon

First full moon this month -- December 2nd

There will be two full moons this December, on the 2nd and 31st.  (The second full moon in a month is called a “blue moon.”) Yesterday morning I finished my run around Green Lake just as the moon was about to set, so I ran back to the house for my camera.  I wanted to take advantage of the clear skies to photograph the moonset over Phinney Ridge and the lake.  It was a wonderful morning to witness the moon setting just as the morning sun was brightening the day.

Waiting for the moon to set and the sun to rise

The full moon descending in the western skies

Moonset over Phinney Ridge

Full moon touches the horizon

Christmas Cards and Letters

This year my annual Christmas letter is printed on the computer.

Stamping the Christmas letters

I enjoy receiving Christmas cards and letters in the mail.  Although I’ve pared my list down, I still send an annual letter to five cousins, one aunt, one uncle, and a handful of old friends.  Some years I write my greetings by hand, but this year I’ve opted for the ease of a computer-generated letter.

Some people make fun of the annual Christmas letter, as it can be seen as a show of one-upmanship, bragging about children’s accomplishments and exotic trips.  But I always look forward to hearing about how friends and family are doing — everyone’s lives are busy, and if it weren’t for this once-a-year letter, I’m sure the relationship would fall even more to the wayside.

Rural mail delivery -- who doesn't look forward to a letter in their mailbox?

So keep those cards and letters coming!

I’ll end this post by sharing one of my favorite seasonal essays by Garrison Keillor.  This essay was published in the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper on Christmas Eve 2006 (http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/296931_keillor22.html).  But I’ve copied it here for you as well:

A perfectly adequate Christmas letter

By GARRISON KEILLOR
GUEST COLUMNIST

I love reading Christmas newsletters in which the writer bursts the bonds of modesty and comes forth with one gilt-edged paragraph after another: “Tara was top scorer on the Lady Cougars soccer team and won the lead role in the college production of ‘Antigone,’ which, by the way, they are performing in the original Greek. Her essay on chaos theory as an investment strategy will be in the next issue of Fortune magazine, the same week she’ll appear as a model in Vogue. How she does what she does and still makes Phi Beta Kappa is a wonderment to us all. And, yes, she is still volunteering at the homeless shelter.”

I get a couple dozen Christmas letters a year, and I sit and read them in my old bathrobe as I chow down on Hostess Twinkies. Everyone in the letters is busy as beavers, piling up honors hand over fist, volunteering up a storm, traveling to Beijing, Abu Dhabi and Antarctica; nobody is in treatment or depressed or flunking out of school, though occasionally there is a child who gets shorter shrift.

“Chad is adjusting well to his new school and making friends. He especially enjoys the handicrafts.” How sad for Chad. There he is in reform school learning to get along with other little felons and making belts and birdhouses, but he can’t possibly measure up to the goddess Tara. Or Lindsay or Meghan or Madison, each of whom is also stupendous.

This is rough on us whose children are not paragons. Most children aren’t. A great many teenage children go through periods when they loathe you and go around slamming doors and playing psychotic music and saying things like “I wish I had never been born,” which is a red-hot needle stuck under your fingernail. One must be very selective, writing about them for the annual newsletter. “Sean is becoming very much his own person and is unafraid to express himself. He is a lively presence in our family and his love of music is a thing to behold.”

I come from Minnesota, where it’s considered shameful to be shameless, where modesty is always in fashion, where self-promotion is looked at askance. Give us a gold trophy and we will have it bronzed so you won’t think that we think we’re special. There are no Donald Trumps in Minnesota: We strangled them all in their cribs. A football player who likes to do his special dance after scoring a touchdown is something of a freak.

The basis of modesty is winter. When it’s 10 below zero and the wind is whipping across the tundra, there is no such thing as stylish and smart, and everybody’s nose runs. And the irony is, if you’re smart and stylish, nobody will tell you about your nose. You look in the rearview mirror and you see a gob of green snot hanging from your left nostril and you wonder, “How long have I been walking around like that? Is that why all those people were smiling at me?”

Yes, it is.

So we don’t toot our own horns. We can be rather ostentatious in our modesty and can deprecate faster than you can compliment us. We are averse to flattery. We just try to focus on keeping our noses clean.

So here is my Christmas letter:

Dear friends. We are getting older but are in fairly good shape and moving forward insofar as we can tell. We still drink strong coffee and read the paper and drive the same old cars. We plan to go to Norway next summer. We think that this war is an unmitigated disaster that will wind up costing a trillion dollars and we worry for our country. Our child enjoys her new school and is making friends. She was a horsie in the church Christmas pageant and hunkered down beside the manger and seemed to be singing when she was supposed to. We go on working and hope to be adequate to the challenges of the coming year but are by no means confident. It’s winter. God is around here somewhere but does not appear to be guiding our government at the moment. Nonetheless we persist. We see kindness all around us and bravery and we are cheered by the good humor of young people. The crabapple tree over the driveway is bare, but we have a memory of pink blossoms and expect them to return. God bless you all.

 

December To-Do List

Embroidered mini-quilt for December

Holiday activities dominate my December “To-Do” List. I’ve given up many holiday obligations over the years, but I choose to keep up a few holiday traditions that I enjoy most.  I revisit the list every year and pare down the things that seem more like chores than joy.  Here’s my list for 2009 :

• Make a wreath and hang it by the front door
• Treat myself to a hot chocolate drink at Chocolati
• Listen to Christmas carols and sing along
• Bake Christmas cookies and share with friends
• Splurge on an eggnog latte from Starbucks
• Write and mail Christmas greetings to distant friends and relatives
• Drive around and admire holiday lights in the neighborhood
• Put flannel sheets on the bed
• Bake gingerbread cake and enjoy it warm from the oven
• Re-read some Christmas classics — this year it will be Christmas on Jane Street and A Child’s Christmas in Wales, among others
• Snow shoe if the weather allows

Passing Seasons

A late November morning at Green Lake

Rosy pink dawn at Green Lake

“Live each season as it passes.”
     — Henry David Thoreau

Another month has passed, and soon autumn will dissolve into winter. The days are so short.  Sometimes you have to get up early to experience the best light before the thick gray clouds take over the day.  This is late fall in Seattle.

 

Turkey Leftovers

Ingredients for Black Bean Soup with leftover turkey

Southwestern Turkey and Black Bean Soup

One of the best things about leftover turkey is the chance to make and enjoy Black Bean Soup.  I found my favorite Black Bean Soup recipe in the Eat, Drink and Be Chinaberry cookbook compiled by the Chinaberry Book Service in 1996, and I have been making this soup ever since.  (I love reading the book recommendations from Chinaberry.  Now that my daughter is grown, I no longer read the reviews of children’s books, but I still get good ideas from the “Good Reads for Adults.”  You can find them at http://chinaberry.com/.)

Southwestern Turkey and Black Bean Soup
(Original recipe submitted to Chinaberry by Barb DeWeerd, Wisconsin)

3 cans (15 oz) black beans
4 c chicken or turkey stock
1 T olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
1 large red pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 tsp cumin
1 can diced tomatoes, drained
2 c diced, cooked turkey
3 small jalapeno peppers, seeded and minced

Puree 1-1/2 cans black beans in food processor with one cup broth.  Set aside.

Heat oil in large pan.  Add onions and pepper.  Saute 10 minutes until tender.  Add garlic and cumin.  Stir one minute.  Add tomatoes, bean mixture and remaining whole beans.  Gradually add 2 cups stock and bring to a boil.  Simmer 20 minutes.

Add turkey, jalapeno and heat through.  Season with salt and pepper.

I serve the soup with corn bread or tortilla chips.  I usually top my soup with a spoonful of sour cream, grated cheese and diced avocado.

 

Thrify Mittens

Wool mittens from shrunken sweater

My new-to-me mittens from a recycled sweater

Warm woolen mittens

I love the thriftiness of my latest project — sewing mittens from old cast-off sweaters.  I found a blue woolen sweater in a box of free stuff on the curb in my neighborhood.  The owner was probably giving it away because it had shrunk.  But the felted wool was perfect for making mittens.  My oldest sister mailed the pattern to me.  I like the mittens so much, that I made a few more pairs from some leftover fleece that I had in my scrap bag.

3-piece mitten pattern

Mittens from leftover polar fleece

Speaking Bliss

Fluttering leaves

Red maple leaves

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.”
     — Emily Bronte

Yellow maple leaf

“Nothing gold can stay.”
     — Robert Frost

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

 

Here is Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation from October 3rd, 1863, establishing Thanksgiving Day:

“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the everwatchful providence of almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.  They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people.  I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.   And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.

A. Lincoln”

Lessons in Gratitude 8

Our Thanksgiving table

“. . . a thankful heart hath a continual feast.”
     — W. J. Cameron

“Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.”
     — William Shakespeare

Our Thanksgiving Menu

Turkey roasted in convection oven
with Giblet Dressing

Garlic Mashed Potatoes
with Pan Turkey Gravy

Oven-roasted Yams and Sweet Onions
with thyme seasoning

Sautéed Brussels Sprouts

Green Bean Casserole

Cranberry Sauce

Sweet Potato Pie
with French Vanilla Ice Cream

 

 

Thanksgiving Guests

Framed embroidery -- Thanksgiving Day poem

Wishing you a safe journey if you are traveling on this Thanksgiving Day holiday!

Over the River
by Lydia Marie Child, 1844

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river, and through the wood—
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
As over the ground we go.

Over the river, and through the wood,
To have a first-rate play.
Hear the bells ring, “Ting-a-ling-ding”,
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!

Over the river, and through the wood
Trot fast, my dapple-gray!
Spring over the ground like a hunting-hound,
For this is Thanksgiving Day.

Over the river, and through the wood—
And straight through the barnyard gate,
We seem to go extremely slow,
It is so hard to wait!

Over the river, and through the wood—
Now Grandmother’s cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!