Second Thanksgiving

Growing up, I had the most 50s sit-com family that could possibly exist in the 1980s.  Dad was a firefighter, Mom stayed home with me and my sister until she got a part-time job (just for the hours we were in school) when I was about 8.  I didn't have a bad holiday experience until I was in my mid-twenties.

My mom and her two sisters used to rotate who had what holiday at who's house.  We also used to switch back and forth between celebrating with Mom's side and celebrating with Dad's side.  It was the only holiday we needed to split.  All this continued even after my parents got divorced in 1995.

Then at some point, probably when Mom was moving houses, she and her sisters stopped rotating holidays and one aunt always has Thanksgiving, one has Christmas and Mom has Easter.  In 2001 we had our last Thanksgiving with Dad's side because his step-mother (the only Grandma I'd known on that side) passed away the following April.  Grandpa went to live with my Uncle in Cincinnati, and that was the end of big Thanksgiving get-togethers on my dad's side.

Somewhere along the way, Mom, who hates turkey the rest of the year, reached the point where she was tired of never having Thanksgiving leftovers to munch on for days on end - turkey, cranberry jello, stuffing, Mom's mind-blowing pumpkin pie...  So she started cooking a Thanksgiving dinner the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving and we'd stuff ourselves again that night and nibble on leftovers for days, the way things should be.

We have a Canadian friend who we often invite down for Thanksgiving since Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving at an appropriate time for a harvest festival.  So she usually brings a bottle of wine for Mom, a bottle of wine for dinner, and some Canadian smokes for my sister.  We head to my aunt's to gorge ourselves, come back to Mom's on the verge of a food coma and moan with happy discomfort.  We also have a friend from Michigan who we met the same day as our Canadian friend.  When Canada is visiting, Michigan usually comes down to kill two visits with one road trip, but not until after Thanksgiving.

So the second dinner Mom cooks every year started being our Thanksgiving with friends.  Our local friends got to know Canada and Michigan over the years and we started inviting some of them to the dinner Mom cooks.

And thus, slowly but surely, what has come to be known in our family as Second Thanksgiving (thanks, Tolkien!) was created.  It's now truly a second Thanksgiving dinner.  We could have as many as 17 people at Mom's this year - bigger than our normal family dinner!  My sister has called Second Thanksgiving "Like Thanksgiving, but with people you like!"

Since I actually like most of our relatives, I prefer to think of Second Thanksgiving as "Thanksgiving with the family we chose."

Whatever you're up to this weekend, whether you're celebrating or avoiding the holiday like the plague, I hope you're with people you love.

What a Depressing Hallowversary

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

I'm not sure when it started winning over Christmas, but I do know I was fairly young. I have many many memories of very happy Halloweens as a kid. Hell, my mom announced to me and my sister on October 27th 1994 that she and dad were getting divorced and I still managed to have a happy Halloween that year. It would have ruined Christmas.

Halloween 1997

We grew up with ALL the animated Halloween specials. The radio stations play Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Linus and Lucy" at Christmas time but that's how It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown starts. It will always be Halloween music to my ears. I learned the origin of the word "Halloween" from the 1970s special The Halloween that Almost Wasn't. And who wouldn't want a night rollicking with a slightly crazed witch like in Witch's Night Out? Plus good luck hearing "Werewolves of London" outside of October.

Then, in my mid-twenties when I became a pagan, Halloween took on the spiritual significance that had always been the only thing missing from the day. My favorite holiday becomes a double holiday? Sign me up! Samhain is, for many pagans, our spiritual New Year. It's a good time for me to make a resolution or two considering National Novel Writing Month starts the next day.

In 2006 I was still working but my health problems were becoming a work problem. I went home early from work at the candy store that Halloween. For the first time I was really, truly depressed on my favorite holiday. I didn't even dress up for Halloween. My poor, terrified,  ex-Jehovah's Witness husband got stuck with handing out candy that evening. I sat down in front of the TV and worked on a little decorative box on which I was trying to recreate the sky from Great Pumpkin (impossible, by the way, unless you're an actual artist).

We had started watching MSNBC earlier in the year because CNN was driving me nuts and MSNBC seemed to have a little bit of sanity on it. And that night we flipped over to MSNBC during the 8pm hour. In 2006 at 8pm on MSNBC was Countdown with Keith Olbermann. 

There are several reasons why this moment of first finding Countdown is stuck in my head forever. If we tuned in very long before the Worst Persons in the World segment, I wasn't paying much attention. But it was Halloween and when Toccata in D, which had always been Dracula's Theme in my head, started I paid attention. What stuck even more was what the guy on my TV was saying. He was calling out hypocrisy, and general douchieness. No one on TV did that except Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and they were comedians! This was on an actual news channel!

The next night I wanted to see more of this show and see if the Worst Persons bit had just been for Halloween. Of course, it hadn't been. I was hooked, my husband was hooked and we have been ever since.

This year we're losing the house we bought with a predatory loan in late 2005. The house is barely decorated because I couldn't see the point of unpacking stuff that would just need repacked when I was already packing the rest of the house. I'm not dressing up, though I do have a witchy outfit planned for handing out candy. And this year I won't close out trick-or-treat by watching the election and hurricane recovery coverage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Tonight I will be lighting a number of candles for friends and for all those affected by the storm, and we will be donating to storm relief efforts.

Werewolves of DC

For the purposes of this blog entry, I'm going to refer to my husband as The Werewolf or variations thereof.  It's a nickname that's come from twitter and we kind kinda like it. :)

I had never been to DC, but The Werewolf had been several times.  Why were we there?  For a job interview.

Happy Birthday to my Mom

 Mom holding me when I was 4 months old.

My mom, Peggy, was born August 10th in the year none-of-your-damn-business.  She was the third of four children born to my grandparents, Hedwig and Benjamin.  She grew up in Akron, Ohio and went to the same schools as my dad, had many of the same friends, and yet the two of them didn't meet until they were 28 years old!  They got married after dating only six months, probably not the smartest thing either of them ever did.

Mom wanted to go to college but there was no money, so she took high school classes to help land herself a good secretary job.  She was so good that when her boss from one job was opening a new office he pretty much begged her to come work for him, which she did because he was a good boss (plus yay, a raise).  She left work when it was time to have me.

My mom is an awesome mom.  My dad was a firefighter which meant he worked a 24/48 shift - he was at work for 24 hours and off for 48 (unless he got overtime or there was a big emergency).

Mom and I were just discussing the fact that all the "adventures" happened when my dad was at the fire station.  I don't even remember the earliest instance of this.  Mom says there was a day when my sister and I were really little and Mom smelled gas in the house.  So she called the fire department (the local one, not the one my dad worked for) and took my sister and me out to the very back of our yard for safety.

The trend would continue when my sister and the two younger neighbor kids (who I and one of the older neighbor kids were supposed to be watching for a minute while Mom ran inside) decided to wander off into the wooded back yards of our neighborhood and get lost for half an hour.  Then a few years later during a thunder storm, a tulip tree right behind the house split in the wind and fell on the back of the house. Thankfully the damage was minimal but it started my dad's quest to eliminate all tulip trees in our yard.

The most memorable emergency while dad was at work, for both me and Mom, was in fifth grade when I fell and broke my ankle.  I was down the street at a schoolmate's house where a bunch of us were having a water fight.  The hose got involved and a big muddy patch developed.  I ran through it, slipped and fell on my ankle with my leg out to the side.  My friends encouraged me to walk it off like you do with most injuries as a kid.  Thankfully the pain told me not to listen to them.  My friend, Laurie, ran down to her house where she called my mom to come pick me up.  It's a good thing she did because my ankle was bro-ken. Snapped clean in half.  And my bone doctor said it was a good thing I didn't walk on it because I'd have needed surgery if I had.  But that was after Mom drove my soaking, muddy butt home, helped me change into clean dry clothes the only way I could - laying on the kitchen floor (while she also talked to my dad on the phone), and took me to the ER.

I have many more fabulous memories of Mom than ones where she's yelling (though she doesn't believe this).  Like picnicking under the big "witch tree" in our back yard, and all the summers she took us to Fell Lake pool (the best pool in the history of pools), and laughing so hard it hurt while playing board games at her house.  It was Mom who took me to my 2nd - 7th Moody Blues concerts; drove with me out to South Bend, IN to see "Weird Al" Yankovic; and was in Burlington, Ontario with me for a Scottish film festival to see actor Billy Boyd when the Iraq War started.  In short, she's fed my fandoms happily!  Probably because she usually gets sucked into them.  She was just as excited to see the Moody Blues as I was every year and she ended up a fan of Keith Olbermann even though she rarely got to see Countdown.  My calling her and recapping the show probably didn't hurt that...

Mom loves to sing and loves music.  When we were growing up it was lighter rock (which I still adore) like ABBA and Lionel Richie, though I did find out in my teens that she's always been a Bad Company fan.  Then as my sister and I got older we introduced Mom to "new" music like Pink Floyd (she loves "Comfortably Numb") Boston, Van Halen, and Fountains of Wayne.

My parents got divorced after 21 years of marriage, when I was a young teen.  No divorce is really easy but I think theirs was the easiest. Mom and Dad are still friends and as anyone who knows my family or reads my tweets knows, we all still have dinners together, celebrate holidays together, and do birthdays together.  My parents are great friends.  They just didn't work as a married couple.  Mom made a lot of sacrifices after the divorce to try to make things easier my sister and me. It worked, and I'll always be so thankful for all she gave up and wish I could repay her somehow.

I think it's obvious I could go on and on and on. I love my mom dearly and am so glad she's having her *mumble* birthday today and I hope she has at least a hundred more!!!!!!!!!

Hello, 2012...

So here we are in 2012, a year people have been anticipating.

Let's get this out of the way, right now.  I don't think the world is going to end this year.  I'm planning to party on the winter solstice like I do every year because I'm a good heathen.  Okay it's mostly because I love eggnog, but I'm still planning my party.  I'm not concerned about Mayan calenders; look at them, they're circles, they don't end.  I'm not concerned about planetary alignments that are going to melt the ice caps overnight and flood the coasts (mostly because neither Countdown contributor and astronomer Derrick Pitts nor Jim Cantore have mentioned this danger).  Also I'm pretty sure The Weather Channel would have non-stop specials on our impending doom if it were even the slightest threat - "It WILL Happen Tomorrow!!1!"

That's not to say there isn't a lot going on this year.  There's the presidential election in November and the torturous 10 months leading up to it.  Who doesn't love being bombarded by political commercials that seem like rejected SNL spoof ads?  I especially love them now that corporations can pour boatloads of money into campaigns.  By November we'll all be begging to see strange guys happily singing about erectile dysfunction meds and that miserable gecko.  Senator Bernie Sanders is seriously charging toward overturning the Citizen's United ruling that gives us those terrible political ads (as well as outright buying our democracy). Bernie is one of the few truly good people in all of Congress, and I'll be supporting him in his effort any way I can.  

There's the Summer Olympics, too (no Quidditch, so I don't know how much I'll watch).  My big fear with the Olympics is that the park pool where I go will be even fuller than usual.  I finally found an outdoor pool to swim in last summer after five years of basically no swimming.  I am not going back to being pool-less.  It's 19 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm already dreaming of swimming this summer.  Some people might not find five years swim-less appalling, but I grew up swimming in huge outdoor, in-ground, semi-private community pool that covered an acre.  Yes - it was an acre of pool, with a water slide, and diving boards and it was set up like a lake so that most of the edges started at less than a foot and it got deeper toward the middle.  If I sound nostalgic it's because going to that pool almost every day every summer, meeting up with friends, swimming for hours on end was, for me, one of the best parts of growing up.

As far as my personal life, 2012 is looking huge but I can blog about pretty much none of that right now - partly because I don't want to jinx it and partly because so much is yet to be set in stone.  So, shhh... I'll talk about that another time.