post thanksgiving post

Home foods, comfort foods, sitting around a table, Sunday lunch, Thanksgiving dinner, meals as conduits, playful, untroubled, the happy sweat of working a hot oven, the proud burn marks that tell of reaching into fierce heat and pulling out something that makes people feel good.

And then it’s over.

So how fortuitous that the next big eating event is preceded by a period of lights.

The purists will be sure to let me know that a moonlit snow-covered field will out-shine any commercial overuse of electricity on a city street. The purists talk in fictional terms. I haven’t seen a snow-covered field in a long time and especially not in late November or December. Snow is a thing of the past. Chicago hit 60 yesterday. Gray trees, brown lawns, warm-ish temps. Bleak.

Downtown, though, was hopping. Predictably. Anything but bleak.

The city does change, sometimes in unfortunate ways…


Macy's

But on a Friday after Thanksgiving, you can count on the bright lights. Inside and out, in tones of hot fire, like the oven you turned off after the Thanksgiving meal.



And after, when you have been shined and twinkled on to the utmost, there’s a half-pint of Belgian gold waiting for you. Not bad, this end-of-November time.