last night before bed i read a thoughtful article in the wall street journal about how thanksgiving is good because it’s one of the rare times when a family sits down and shares a meal together, and about how rituals are so important to people, and we have so few rituals now…
but this morning i still stand by my opinion that the holiday is lame.
and here’s a part of an interesting post from This Day in History. it’s an e-mail that shows up in my inbox every single day, and frequently the posts about what happened on this day in history are interesting, but i hate it that it’s every.single.day. they add up, and i get so backlogged in reading them. but anyway, here’s how thanksgiving seems to have started:
The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as “Lecture Day,” a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. A famous Thanksgiving observance occurred in the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth governor William Bradford invited local Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day festival held in gratitude for the bounty of the season.
it’s funny to me that this day of eating tons of food evolved from topical sermons. we’ve come a long way…
meanwhile, back in my backyard…on november 9th i went outside and realized that two deer were lying down by the water. the buck is way off on the right, the doe on the left. they turned to look at me, or maybe they were just posing.
so cute.
and on nov. 12th, bev and i went to sangamon auditorium to see “Mariachi Sol de Mexico de Jose Hernandez,” a mariachi band from mexico, obviously. i bought tickets for a series of shows at the auditorium this year, figuring it would be a good way to get kevin out of the house and to a show.
but when it got closer to the date i decided i wouldn’t subject him to the mariachis if he really didn’t want to go, and bev was willing to accompany me.
first of all, they certainly weren’t like the mariachis you see in a mexican restaurant, a few strolling musicians playing guitar. this was a great big band, and they were fantastic. six violins, three guys on horns, a guy with a harp! another with a giant thing like a bass, a ukelele, and a guitar.
this is jose hernandez, the leader, who started the group in the 80s. the only downside was that all the singing was in spanish so we didn’t have any clue about what they might be singing about. at one point he asked everybody who didn’t speak spanish to raise their hands, and there weren’t that many of us. then he said that they’d do a number for us, but it was some big band music with no singing at all!
but it was quite entertaining and l loved their blue pants with the jingly things all down the sides.
we sat in the 6th row during the first half, but the young people next to us kept having long conversations, so we were able to move to the second row for the last half of the show. a group of women were sitting right in front of us, and at one point jose encouraged the audience to sing along. one of the women was pretty old and she enthusiastically sang all the words, cupping her hands over her mouth to increase her volume, which was very loud to begin with. loud and completely tone-deaf. it was very funny, and i’m pretty sure that at some point jose said “enough with the singing already.”
a good time was had by all.
ok then,
mrs. sunday morning hughes.