The temperature outside is in the teens. The woodshed is full and as the ground freezes hard enough to hold the winter's snow there is a lot to give thanks for, including Thanksgiving itself. My whole family has posted their pictures already on Flicker and in emails.
Here are some of my pictures and a couple from them. There were over 30 people at the gathering at my brother Marc's place on Bainbridge Island. I won't try to identify all of them.
Before the big family event. My wife Cheryl and I spent her birthday at Ainsworth Hotsprings. We have gone up there several times over the years. It's only 3 or 4 hours away depending on the route. On the way up we took a route suggested by Google Maps. This was generally speaking, a bad idea. In fact, every route I have seen from Google Maps has been a bad idea. They seem to think major roads are always better than minor roads and mountains don't exist. So after a slushy mountain pass and several places where we needed to follow road signs and not the Google Map instructions, we arrived at the hot springs in a light snow. We had a great time, ate a memorable dinner and returned home in time to attend the Slow Food Potluck meeting at Quillisascut Farm School with lots of friends, neighbors and food.
With only a day in between, we took off Tuesday for Spokane to deliver the latest edition of the Road Atlas of Ferry County to the bindery and from there to Ellensburg to stay with my daughter April who is getting a Masters Degree in Herpetology (Frogology) at Central Washington State. We made a quick trip on Wednesday avoiding a lot of Seattle traffic and loading almost last on the ferry to Bainbridge. We arrived sooner than expected but had an enjoyable time reading
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie.
Thanksgiving Day itself was constant activity. The best part for me was seeing my grandson, Ovid again. As you can gather from the pictures, he was the focus of a lot of attention and seemed to soak it up. Most of the males in the family got together to play music before dinner. This was a lot of fun, but it did cut down on one-on-one visiting with the rest of the family. Of course in former years we might have been outside playing football, and most would agree that music was a step up from football.
Everyone brought something to the party, whether just food or in our case food, music and enough wine and butternut squash to give away to departing guests. The turkey, cooked by Marc's neighbors Nancy and Martin was perfect. There were salads and side dishes. My brother John brought a digital picture frame that ran a constantly changing slide show of his trip to Hawaii with his wife Marilyn. My sister Jeannette brought a projector and narrated the story of a trip to Sicily that she led this summer to see lots of our relatives there (that we didn't even know existed until she started researching them.) These big Italian families are hard to keep up with on either side of the ocean.
We took pictures of lots of the smaller family groups including
my wife Cheryl, my two daughters, Bina and April, Bina's husband Joe and their son Ovid, and April's beau Tony. After slides, music and family photos we sat down for a big spread of desserts baked by my brother John.
People eventually gathered up leftovers and headed out. We stayed overnight again (Thank you Marc and Leigh) and got a very early and empty ferry (again the last to drive on) at 7:05 AM. We were at the opening of Whole Foods, 8 AM for Black Friday and back over the pass and home by 2 PM. Our neighbors Amy and Rufus Cabral kept our pets in food and water. Everything looked good and we were thankful to be back home again.
All of this is not news to people who were there and maybe not significant to people who were not there, but it's nice to have have occasion once a year to see the whole family, if only briefly, and have some fun together. We are lucky to be able to do this and glad that we do. I hope all of you had this good of a start to the holiday season.