A Time to Think...

  Ok, so Halloween is so yesterday!  Yep, my favorite holiday has come and gone now I am ready to move forward to my next "favorite" holiday, Thanksgiving.  While this holiday has a tendency to slip by unnoticed by many who whisk away the Halloween decorations only to burst headlong into Christmas, I celebrate it.  While I may not transform the entire house as I do for the flanking holidays, I do, indeed, decorate for Thanksgiving.  Why not?  My style decorating is easy!  Way back in August, I will start putting out "fall" decorations.  Along about mid to late September, Halloween things start appearing throughout the Little Bayou House.  Then by the time October rolls around, everything is in place.  It has to be this way as more time is needed to prepare for the clue hunt than to decorate for Halloween.  But...the day after the holiday, everything remotely Halloween is removed and we are back to strictly fall.  Add a few pretty Thanksgiving knickknacks and within an hour, the house has gone from one holiday to the next!  

  One thing that does get a complete redo is the large china cabinet.  I have dishes for about every holiday so as one bunch is removed the others go right in place.  This morning as I was pulling black and orange plates and replacing them with my grandmother's turkey plates, it occurred to me that Thanksgiving would not be the same without the mishmash of items collected over the years.  Grandmother's turkey plates are a fine example of tradition.  The plates were actually a Christmas gift to my grandparents from my folks.  Times were lean and Mom was aghast that Pop spent a whole $5 on one gift!  He had gotten the plates and a huge platter from the hardware store!  The plates were used at every holiday meal after that Christmas.  I suppose you could say that it was money well spent for all the use that the dishes have seen.  Using the plates year after year makes me thankful that I had the childhood that I did.  We may have been dirt poor but, then again, we were rich beyond our wildest dreams.   Sitting next to the plates are the small candles that portray a pair of praying pilgrims and a huge cornucopia.  Those candles have been around forever as well.  They never have missed a Thanksgiving meal since I was a child.  Even though they are candles, no one in the family ever made the mistake of lighting them.  The candles were there to remind us that, like that cornucopia, our blessings were huge.  

  A lot of folks probably look at my place in disgust because I do have a tendency to collect oddities.  I like it this way.   I like the memories that these items evoke.  They are good memories.  While it would be nice if these things were cherished by my kids and would find a home with them later on, it does not bother me if they do not.  It is not a matter of what they like. This is what I like.  Personally, I feel comforted by surrounding myself with the"Ghosts of Christmas Past" or of Thanksgiving, Halloween or any other holiday past.  Right now, as the wind is howling out over the Bayou and the windows of the Little Bayou House are rattling, my heart is full of peace. I can ramble about the place and be whisked back to a time when folks showed more gratitude for what they had and for the blessings that were bestowed upon them.  There, I can visit the memories of Grandmother donning her hand stitched apron to snap a huge bowl of green beans,  of Mom using the old rolling pin with the broken handle to bake the best pumpkin and pecan pies ever tasted, of Granddad whittling a whistle for me out of a hickory branch and of Pop hauling another bushel of sweet potatoes off the back of his old truck.  I can bask in the memories of relatives and neighbors who came to share our bounty, of playing hide and seek in the old barn with dozens of cousins and of the smells of delicious, home-cooked foods and sounds of laughter, chattering and someone playing the old upright piano.  In my mind, if some item can jog a happy memory from a time long past, then so be it.  Memories can take us back to a time long forgotten but one that should be long remembered.  Yep, I will celebrate Thanksgiving and be appreciative of the treasures that surround me.