The Sunday after Thanksgiving used to be for me a dreadful day, full of worries and hurried goodbyes. After magnificent Thanksgiving noise, lots of happy hours with grown daughters there was this obvious ending to it all. Drop offs at airports with the stress of poor weather and the inevitable holiday crowds. And then an empty house.
That's all in the past. No one is traveling today, even as the weather is chilly but in a crispy pleasant way. The house isn't exactly empty because the kids are itching to come over for a Gogs play date and of course, there's the evening dinner now back on schedule. For a while anyway. My Chicago girl is darn close to delivering her baby. We expect some schedule shuffling around then. But not yet.
Ed sleeps in once more and normally I'd let him be, but the house needs to be cleaned and besides, we are wasting the best sunlit hours of the day. Ed!
He comes down for breakfast.
After house cleaning, we squeeze in a walk in hour local park and then, back home, I balance kid play with preparing one of the reliable meals of seafood pasta. To get our minds off of turkey and apple gravy and leftover hasselback potatoes.
When I am out on the roads, I see cars with trees on roofs and I think -- everyone is pushing the season earlier this year. And I get it. The pandemic keeps kicking us off the path to normal times and we want to grab as much of those splendid festive moments as we can. We are deprived of frivolity, giddy silliness, of color, of laughter.
My tree, however, is still in the mudroom waiting for a stand. That's okay. I ordered a few more vintage glass ornaments from my friends out in California (they travel all over Europe stocking up for this holiday) and I will trim the tree as things arrive. After I get that darn stand. (Ed pushed hard to keep the tree in a bucket with stones to weigh it down. I know that this would be a clever game plan, but I'm not buying it. I dont want clunky. I want delicate.)
The kids are here in the afternoon.
Ed is napping. They think he makes a good pillow.
The parents and Sandpiper come just in time for some (new) puzzle work before dinner.
(Watching kid dynamics in a threesome is fascinating to me because most of what I know is households of one or two kids. Snowdrop is completely in a new relationship with Sandpiper, with few of the rivalry issues that routinely come up between her and Sparrow.)
And so ends our Thanksgiving family wonderfulness.
Late evening. Ed and I have watched two holiday-ish rom coms already this week. I have a lineup of them all ready for us. But, it's late and we toss aside the movie in favor of a Modern Design episode. It's like picking a snugly tattered blankie over a cashmere shawl for the night. True, we have exhausted all of the seasons (22!) of the UK show. No matter. We're now working our way through New Zealand episodes. With popcorn and a candle burning steadily, giving us just a tiny whiff of the holidays, even though it's not even December yet.
