Dave is going South and Deb is irked about holidays

I've been remiss in reporting that Dave, our man of the woods, told me on Monday that he's moving in with a friend from Norristown for a couple of weeks and then he will he heading south to Florida. That's sort of good and bad news. The good news, for Dave, is that he'll no doubt be a lot warmer in Florida over the next few months than he would be here. The bad news, for me, is that I'll miss running into him in the woods.

The worse news is that Dave mentioned the possibility that he won't return north, at least this far north, next summer. He's thinking of summering in the mountains of Georgia. I told him to keep in touch, which he will hopefully do with Alex when he stops by the occasional library and can get on email.

In other news Debra showed up for a visit a couple of hours ago because she had dropped her mom Dolores off at the hairdresser nearby. We talked her into having a bit of dinner after which she complained that at her school they are not allowed to refer to Christmas and Easter as holidays, instead calling them winter and spring break. But they do refer to Yom Kippur and Kwanzaa as holidays. Kwanzaa, of course is a fake holiday invented by an FBI informant, if memory serves; but Yom Kippur is definitely a religious holiday.

Well. . . after Deb left I got on the computer and one of the first things I found was a post on The Corner by Jay Nordlinger of National Review complaining about the same sort of thing. Here's what he had to say in a post titled Unsilent Night:

"A reader from Boulder, Colo., sends a note that may interest you. It responds to an item in Impromptus today. She says, “In 1994, the Fairview High School Christmas concert was going to close with the students processing out of the auditorium singing ‘Silent Night.’ Huge controversy, with multiple cries against ‘religion in the public schools.’ The school district’s attorneys said no. Since it was too late for the music teacher to arrange for something else, the students began to recess in silence. The audience was having none of it, and started singing ‘Silent Night’ themselves. That story still gives me goose-bumps.”

Holy mackerel, that took brass (and I’m not talking about trumpets and trombones). By the way, I imagine the Boulder people were not able to call that concert a “Christmas concert.” “Winter Serenade”?

Another reader writes to say, “Every December in Chicago, they have the Christkindlmarket. If they called it the ‘Christ Child Market,’ the world would come to an end! And the local bank flashes ‘Happy Holidays,’ followed by ‘Feliz Navidad.’” True, true: You can’t say “Merry Christmas,” but you can say it in Spanish. “And, in my daughter’s public school, they banned Handel but allow black spirituals.” For sure, and thank goodness for spirituals.

We could do this forever, but I’m stopping now. Happy Halloween! (Actually, it’s the day of the Crash, but in any case . . .)"

You can find Jay's post here: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGVjOTg0NzY1MmQ4MjRjOTEzZmM5YTFmZWU0OWFmM2M=

Mr. Tad's Thanksgiving; and some sappy stuff

We just returned home from Thanksgiving dinner. Quite a gathering, perhaps the last of an era because Jas and Kathy have been talking of spending a lot of time in Florida after they retire next August. The Thanksgiving gathering has been at their house for about the last ten years, so we may be getting toward one of those unpleasant junctions in life when old and familiar things change.

Today's gathering included Jas, Kathy, Johnny, Angela, Jenny, Doug, me, Linda, Alex, Christina, Sam, Debra, Samuel, Don, Delores, Marianne, Dave, Liana, Catherine, Mark, Linda and Mark. Dave A had to work, so he missed dinner, although he was around earlier in the day.

Twenty-two of us sharing the most precious thing of all to be thankful for.

Not the food, although the food, prepared mostly by Kathy and Jenny, was excellent - traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, brussel sprouts, peas, a tart cranberry relish, a sweet cranberry mold and, of course, multiple desserts. The food was great, but Thanksgiving gatherings have boasted similar food for all of my sixty years.

And not the scintillating conversation, even though it was wide ranging. And even though Linda remembered that my frog once had a proper name, Mr. Tad. In observance of Thanksgiving I gave Mr. Tad a special treat today, a little pinch of bloodworms from the quarter of an ounce container out of which he has gotten an occasional pinch for about fifteen years. He likes bloodworms, a lot; and even frogs should have reason to be thankful.

And not the memories evoked as we older folks remembered the days of The Three Stooges and bemoaned the fact that the youngsters have no respect for the great old black and white movies. All leading, as such remembrance conversations sometimes do, to marvelling about how Aunt Mary R became fascinated with the story of Lorena Bobbitt, holding her up as an example to all womankind after the first little snippet about her appeared in The Times Herald, long before the story went national in a big way. "Good for her. . .That's what all you men deserve," was her greatest quote. A complex and interesting woman, Aunt Mary R, harboring some deep currents under the image of the dutiful Italian housewife.

But I was talking about being thankful. The most important thing we all have to be thankful for is the fact that Mom and Pop succeeded in raising the four of us in such a way that we have remained compatible one with the other, and as a family, for all of the past forty nine years since Marianne appeared. Even more miraculously, the four of us have all been fortunate enough to make good and lasting marriages to spouses who are also compatible.

For more than fifty years that I can attest to we've been gathering for dinners on Thanksgiving. And that's besides the gatherings for dinner on Christmas, New Year's Day and Easter, and for picnics, cookouts, on Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. We've been a close family even putting aside the run of the mill Sunday dinners and desserts, the Saturday morning coffee klatches, the weekday evening visits, the weeklong vacations together in Stone Harbor, then Chincoteague, then Corolla Light and finally The Villages, plus a couple of road trips out west.

Early on in that period we Augustines clustered with the hordes of ravenous Raimos and Luzis and Capones and Romanos and Piermarinis and DiAngelis's at 403 Walnut Street in Norristown. Grandmom L and Aunt Mary R did the honors for dinners that included thirty or forty, not counting those who stopped by after dinner to pay their respects to Grandmom and Grandpop L, and maybe stay for coffee and "just a little dessert."

At the very peak of decadence back then I remember Thanksgiving dinners that included turkey and all the trimmings as above, plus a ham, plus lasagna and meatballs, all topped off with one of Aunt Mary's signature four layer twenty pound rum cream cakes, several of Mom's apple pies, a couple of pumpkin pies and Aunt Nancy's nonpareil rice pudding which could not be resisted even if one was near to bursting. It's fortunate there were no seat belts in those days, because it would surely have been painful to put them on for the ride back home. Looking back from the perspective of this cholesterol aware age, it's amazing anyone emerged alive from those dinners.

After the gatherings switched to 2808 Second Avenue in Trooper the menu tailed off to turkey and the trimmings, most memorably topped off with one of Mom's cookie sheet apple pies during the period in which she decided that one huge rectangular pie was more efficient to produce than several smaller round ones. Has anyone ever made better apple pie than mom, with that flaky crust that can only be achieve with lard or crisco. There were, of course, always a couple of pumpkin pies that one had to at least sample as well; and sometimes lasagna sneaked onto the menu; but I don't think Mom ever added a ham to the mix.

After dinner and dessert in Trooper, of course, we had to go down to Norristown to visit Grandmom and Grandpop. And it was impossible, once there, to avoid having a couple pieces of rum cream cake and maybe another piece of pie. It would then have been impolite not to at least stop in and say hi to Aunt Carmella, and doubly impolite to turn down her offer of coffee and maybe some cookies to force down while Russos, Jackinskis, Prostocks and DiPrinzios ebbed and flowed around.

Gatherings for Thanksgiving at Mom and Pop's Hopwood Road house in Collegeville, are the most memorable, of course. For what previous occurrences could have competed with the joy at the successive arrival of the various cute little rugrats - John, Rebecca, Jennifer, David, Alex, Samuel, Donald, Catherine and Liana - who first crawled and then ran around in their diapers, and occasionally broke loose and ran around without their diapers, their fathers oblivious and their mothers in hot pursuit.

If each member of that new generation is one tenth as lucky in their relationships as Linda and I have been in the steady closeness we've enjoyed with their parents they will be lucky indeed in life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Update 11/29: Marianne, my annoyingly watchful sister, reminded me last evening that Thanksgiving dinners after 1990 had come full circle and were down at 403 Walnut because Mom was then living with Aunt Mary R. The dinners moved up to Canci Court when Mom moved in with Jas and Kathy after Aunt Mary died. Thus Catherine and Liana celebrated their first Thanksgivings with the family at 403 Walnut.

Note to self - arrange a ravioli making party

Last night at Sam's we had a great dinner with Delores and Samuel. After dinner I got talking with Samuel about the fact that excellent meat filled ravioli are available at Russo's market in Reading. That lead to remembrance of how great it was when Grandmom Luzi, mom and Aunt Mary Raimo made hundreds of ravioli with the meat and cooked them three ways.

Is there a food better than fried ravioli with powdered sugar, especially when topped off with a hearty plateful of ravioli with gravy and at least a few of the curly kind eaten white with grated cheese?

Angela surely has the recipe and the memory of how to make meat ravioli. Marianne has the rolling machine and perhaps she also has the grinder for the meat filling. Marianne probably also has mom's ravioli cutter and sealer, but if necessary we can cut them with a cup and seal them with a fork. It takes a long time to make ravioli for a big crowd but it's one of those meals which rewards almost as much by the camaraderie of the making as in the eating.

What holiday was reserved for meat ravioli? It wasn't Easter and it wasn't Christmas. It was probably New Years Day. Did they make the ravioli with leftover turkey from Christmas? Angela will know. How would one go about getting all the pieces of this project together?