Thanksgiving

I am upstairs in the "office" with the boys. We watched a little bit of the parade on TV, and now they are watching a video while playing with toys, while I read email and attempt to blog.

After H2 woke up at 7 am, I nursed him and put him back to bed. H1 was also up, but he is more self-sufficient when he gets up early, so I just went back to bed. An hour later when H1 was knocking on the door asking for breakfast (well, he's only four, he's not THAT self-sufficient!) J got up, so I got to sleep in.

I'm glad I did, cause I had a nice dream. It was Christmas time, and I was in Pulaski, TN, my parents' hometown. In the dream, my dad and my grandmother were both alive. In one scene of the dream, we were at a party at someone's house, and dad was ready to leave. I was going with him, and was going to walk back to the party afterwards. For some reason, he picked me up and put me in the bed of the pickup truck he was driving. Cut to the next scene. I'm sitting on a couch, next to my late grandmother, and she's smoking, as she did in life. I am smoking, too, though I have never been more than a social smoker in college. She says something to me about how I shouldn't be smoking since I have to drive later. I tell her it's not smoking, but drinking that means you shouldn't drive. Then I realize I'm smoking a cigarette held in an electric tooth brush handle, and it's really pretty nasty to have a cigarette rotating quickly throughout your mouth. Blech! Glad I'm not a smoker in real life, though if I were, I think I'd quit after that dream!

In the next scene, I'm looking through a couple of baskets of Christmas ornaments at my grandmother's house. They are handmade or hand-decorated ones. There are a few with letters on them, so I am looking for some with Hs for the boys. I don't see any H ornaments, but there is a Santa ornament that has my father's face, and another ornament looks like my late great-grandmother, though I can barely remember her face from life, so it was one that you just had to trust the dream. I was thinking that I wouldn't be able to have these ornaments as one of the other siblings or cousins might want them, too, though I really wanted to take them.

And then I woke up. It was already 10:30, and I had a not-so-big day ahead of me: THANKSGIVING, though only our immediate family, and we're not cooking anything special. My friend Liz is bringing over some enchiladas that Corina, who cleans both of our houses twice a month, brought to Liz. Corina's mother, who is visiting from Mexico, made them, but Liz has bad morning sickness and can't handle the onion smell from them. So, the boys, J and I will be having a very Ole Thanksgiving!

Definitely not in the spirit of the first Thanksgiving! The town where I grew up, Duxbury, MA, was one of the first towns settled by the Pilgrims after Plymouth. We knew A LOT about the Pilgrims from school, since their heritage was all over the place. We didn't wear black or those goofy hats or anything like that, but since there were monuments honoring Pilgrims everywhere, it was hard to avoid. There was even a granite slab inscribed to a horse used by the early shipbuilders for rope-making, for crying out loud! Honest Dick was apparently a very honorable horse. He walked around in a circle, twisting ropes all day. And all he got for it was this crappy inscribed plaque! Well, sorry, I googled him and couldn't find anything, but I think the plaque is on the grounds of the Myles Standish Monument somewhere, so if you happen to be there you can look around for the final resting spot of this good horse.

Ok, while trying to find confirmation of Honest Dick, I came up with the following. From another blog, of all places! Warning, this is disturbing, and I hope HD didn't know anyone involved!

Time to shower. I don't want to scare Liz off before she hands over the Thanksgiving Enchiladas.

Here's something to sing as you gather round your turkey, stuffing, and cranberries.

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/w/e/wegattog.htm

We sang this at one of my school plays. I was a Native American extra. I braided my hair, cut up some old brown towels into a fringed shirt to wear over some brown cords, and stuck a feather in my hair. Though the Wampanoag people would have not had feathers sticking up in the air. They were a woodland tribe, so if you wear feathers, they should be braided into your hair so they won't catch on the tree branches.

Some more Thanksgiving-related info: http://www.tolatsga.org/wampa.html
Though this is mostly about the Wampanoag tribe, there's the story of the Pilgrims, too.