Thanks Giving and Snow

For the last couple years, Thanksgiving has marked the beginning of winter in these woods.It's an odd little coincidence. Last year saw us driving home for Thanksgiving festivities in a sloppy snowstorm; this Thanksgiving morning we woke up to 3 inches of fresh, fluffy snow. I guess it's kind of pretty.

The lake (the part we can see at least) iced over the day before Thanksgiving. When Andy and I were driving into town on Thanksgiving morning, we realized that the lake was open for less than 28 weeks in 2013. Didn't really need that reminder that I live in the land of endless winter. Meh.

So did everyone have a good Thanksgiving?

We had a lovely, albeit it busy, few days around here. I worked on the annual community Thanksgiving dinner on both Wednesday (prep) and Thursday (actual cooking and serving) that our church puts on for anyone who doesn't feel like putting on a big Thanksgiving dinner themselves. We usually feed about 100 people each year. My contributions this year were a pumpkin and a cranberry/cherry pie. Despite my best efforts, my pumpkin pie did weep ever so slightly. Apparently the weeping happens when the filling gets overcooked and egg in the custard seizes up and starts squeezing out the filling's liquid, but I was too slow with my instant read thermometer to catch the pie before the filling passed 150 degrees. Better luck next time. And also, yes, I do have that much time on my hands to obsess over such things.

I didn't actual eat dinner at the church, but instead headed over to Andy's mom's house around 3 with a bag filled with leftovers. (Winning!). Apparently lots of people went non-traditional with their Thanksgiving "feasts" this year - we had sushi (not made from the aforementioned leftovers), my grandfather had fondue and my brother had pirogies. And no, I do not know what that is all  about.

The smoked herring is attacking!

I'm not afraid to admit that we went to bed at 9 on Thanksgiving night and that I was out like a light. It was a good day.

Did anyone brave Black Friday sales on Friday or (heaven forbid!) Thursday? For the most part I completed my Christmas shopping last weekend and am feeling incredibly on top of things and also not brokeity broke broke. (You can check out my tips for saving Christmas moola here.)  If you still need to pick up some things, remember the Cyber Monday sale going on over at Yes Sir, Yes Sir today. Get free shipping for any order with the coupon code SHIPFREE and today only, all orders over $25.00 receive a complimentary holiday ornament. 

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A Stitch in Time

Sunday evening came. Sunday evening went, deer season ended and yet, there is no deer hanging in the shed. For the first time in four years, Andy did not get a deer this season. On the bright side (?), barely anyone got a deer this year. The harvest in northeastern Minnesota was down almost 20%, thanks in part to hard winter last year that thinned the herd and some pretty terribly hunting conditions almost every day of the season. 

So there's no joy in Mudville. Actually, it's more like Frozenville around here. There's been a serious layer of ice on the bay since Sunday and since it's midday and just about 11 degrees F outside, I'd say that ice isn't going anywhere for the next four - five months. C'est la vie.  

It feels strange not having several evenings of sausage making ahead of us and I have to admit a little part of me is dying knowing I can't whip up a batch of venison stew on the first -20 below day in January. But I'm pretty sure we won't starve even if the freezer does look a little skimpy. (At least the freezer still has plenty of garden veggies, eh?) Yesterday I binned up all of Andy's hunting gear and schlepped it and the meat grinder out to the shed. What else can you do?  

This morning I wrapped up a project that's basically consumed me for the last week and a half. I finished up the very last mitten is an order of five pairs to be worn by a bride and bridesmaids at a wedding on the first full weekend of December. It was a rush order because the first Etsy seller the bride contacted backed out less than a month before the big day. I have to say, knitting a mitten a day is no way to live your life and I'm really over purple as a wedding color. (Sad, because I used to love it!) But I'm so thrilled to have the project complete and to have added another special element to the wedding day. Fingers crossed that they get a little snow to make the wedding photos even more fun with all of these crazy mittens! 

As you probably, I've been struggling with focus and creativity all year. (I know you're sick of hearing about it - please excuse the wallow.) But guess what?!

All of that time spent focusing on mittens seems to have gotten the creative juices flowing because on Sunday morning I sat down and tapped out what I think are the first 500+ words of a children's novel. The story's been drifting through my head since the summer, but I'd been doing my best to ignore it , partly because I didn't have time to write and partly because, a children's novel? Really? Then on Sunday, as I was bringing in firewood, the details of the story became so clear, that I knew I had to at least start it.   

I truly have not written a word of fiction since Spring 2011 which, come to think about it, might be the primary culprit in what shall be known as "The Funk of 2013." I'd stopped making room for creative writing, because, well, fiction doesn't generally make you mo' money, mo' money. But it turns out that a steady diet of freelance assignments and commitments is just a recipe for burnout. When I hit save on that little teeny piece of fiction on Sunday morning, my heart felt happier and more free that it has in a very long time.  Sure, I need to get on top of my actual "work work" very soon (November has been an unmitigated disaster, y'all), but somehow I think those 500 words of fiction each morning will actually make it easier to rise up and face the music. 

I'm off to town to tomorrow to bake pies and help prep for the annual community Thanksgiving dinner. Is it just me, or has Thanksgiving taken forever to get here this year? (Yes, I know it's late.) I'm ready for some Christmas music! Anyone celebrating Thanksgivikkah?!

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Thanks Giving

Earlier this month, I stumbled upon a Pin that made me sit up and think hard.

Source: a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net via Ada on Pinterest

I almost groaned when I read that Pin because if that idea ever became a reality, I'm pretty sure I'd be out in the cold, hungry and without a lick of clothing. Like most people, I don't stop very often to express gratitude for everything in my life that truly improves the quality of my existence. It's far too easy to take warm clothes in your closet, a full fridge, and roof over your head for granted, even when natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy really should be prompting most of us to acknowledge just how good so many of us have it.

I'm not an overly (or overtly) religious person, but I had enough years of Sunday school and Vacation Bible School in my youth to keep "the big guy in the sky" in mind whenever I offer up some thankful thoughts. Sometime in college, I gave up trying to figure out where Jesus and Christianity fit in my adult life, but I still hold onto an idea that there is some inherent goodness in the world that is bigger than we are. Whether you refer to that shadowy thing as the Universe, the Maker, the Goddess, Allah, the Lord, God, just plain old beauty and goodness, or whatever is hardly a matter we should bother quibbling over. But I do believe it's worth taking stock of the beauty and goodness that surrounds us on a regular basis and offering up a prayer, thought, or vibe of thanks for everything.

After all, the grateful person tends to be the gracious person. When we acknowledge the abundance that exists in our lives, we tend to want less. There are multiple psychological studies that correlate a grateful mind with an enhanced sense of well-being. It's interesting to note that Thanksgiving comes not only at the end of the fall harvest (yeah abundance!), but also at a time when the world is growing dark and people starting to slip into their season affective disorders. Really, we should be using the Thanksgiving as late autumn boost to our mental health instead of the kick-off to the holiday stress season.  

Somewhere the actual "thanks giving" of Thanksgiving got lost in worrying about potatoes boiling over, football games, and Black Friday sales that are ever creeping, creeping towards Thursday evening. I'm not saying that we don't stop to say thanks this time of year. (Hello 30 Days of Thankfulness over on Facebook.) What I'm trying to say is that there is so very much to be thankful for in our lives that it's impossible to get our arms around all of it, let alone lay out all that goodness in the laundry lists of thankfulness that become so popular in the social media world this time each year.

Going back to the Pin above, what wouldn't I want to be without when I wake up each morning? Well, I'd still want to find myself in a cozy bed with a crackling fire in the woodstove in the next room, and have a loving partner and family, and plenty of food, and lots of clothes, and employment, and a beautiful place to live, and birds that visit the feeders, and a blog, and writing skills, and a sense of humor, and lots of yarn, and the Internetz, and le Netflix, and, and, and . . . .

So this year, I'm skipping the laundry list of things that I'm thankful for, because I know to try to name every thing I'm thankful for is liking attempting to number the stars. Instead, I'll just offer up a simple "Thank you" to whoever (whatever) is out there and hope that if I remember to say those two little words a little more often, I'll remind myself and the universe of just how grateful I am for everything - and I mean everything- that I'm blessed with.

Happy Thanksgiving!
 

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November Sponsor Round-Up: Thankfulness Edition

Holy jamoly, it's nearly the middle of November already! Before much more of this month passes us by, I want to introduce you to some of the lovely ladies who are hanging out with me this November over on my sidebar. To shake things up a little bit, I asked each of them to share what they're thankful for this month. Very apropos, don't you think? ;)

Today, I'm thankful that the sun came out, even for the briefest of whiles. The sunshine gave me the little burst of energy I needed to through my day's to-do list and it also meant I didn't have to start a fire in the woodstove until after sundown. Winning!

By the by, wanna be part of the next sponsor round-up? Check out sponsorship options here or email me to discuss swaps. 

Lynn of Turnips 2 Tangerines

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Hi, I'm Lynn from Turnips 2 Tangerines. You can always find me in my Little Kitchen in the Big Woods of Northern WI, making family favorites. Stop by and join me.

I am thankful for the love and joy that my family brings to my life. 

Right now Lynn has a Winter Giveaway going on. You could win a Nordic Ware Snowman Baking Pan, 16 oz Door County Seasonal Coffee, Two (2) Holiday mugs filled with Peppermint Candies. Check it out!

Eline of Eline S.

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 Hi I'm Eline! I'm from Belgium and I'm studying tourism and recreation/leisure management. After my schoolwork I love to make my own jewelry. This blog is about my shop, my creations, cool craft tutorials and I show people where I found my inspiration. Through my blog I hope to meet other creative people.

I'm very thankful for my new 'secondhand' car. I am also very happy I could help as a volunteer on the Etsy booth on The festival of Creativity in Turnhout.

Zalika of Hope and Sugar

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Hi this is Zalika. Hope & Sugar focuses on Self-development. It is a personal blog where I share my thoughts an lessons from life experiences.

I am thankful for all my existing friends and also all the new friends I made because of blogging.

Hannah of Thirsty World Designs

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I'm an artist and blogger from North Carolina, and Thirsty World Designs revolves around my daily adventures, however big or small!  It's has a lot of my photography and local places, events, or cuisine as its subject!  I try to blog about all kinds of topics but it all ends up circling around the art and people closest to me!

I am beyond thankful for this beautiful season we've had, as well as the job I have received that is actually in my career field as a recent college graduate!

Tell me: What are you thankful for this November?
 

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A day for community

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! May your turkey (or tofurkey, if that's how you roll) be plentiful and your tables and counter tops overflow with pies, rolls, potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, veggies, and whatever other starchy goodness your family and friends serve up as part of your annual T-day feast.

Currently, I'm hunkered down at Andy's mom's house, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade (that is to say, I'm watching commercials and commentators, there's very little parading going on) on mute and a special "Thankfulness" edition of a local radio program. Yesterday I baked two pumpkin pies and spent a bit of the afternoon at the church doing prep work for the community Thanksgiving dinner my mother coordinates every year.

Pretty much since we moved back to my mom's hometown when I was in first grade, we've spent Thanksgiving Day at church at the annual community Thanksgiving dnner. When I was in middle school, my mom started to coordinate the dinner (today marks the dinner's 38th year) and since then, she's only taken one year off. Our Thanksgivings aren't spent in a family living room watching football. Instead, they're spent in a steamy church kitchen making mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes, et al for 100+ people.

The dinner is often confused with being a charity effort, but that isn't the case at all. It's a community dinner. It's a free dinner option for anyone, regardless of their political, religious, or socioeconomic standing who doesn't want  the hassle of making the dinner themselves.  So yes, there are people who come because they have nowhere else to go, but there are also entire extended families who choose to eat their Thanksgiving dinner in this setting. Delivery and pick-up meals are available for those with limited mobility and we also offer rides to those who want to attend. The tag line for the dinner is "No charge, no sermon."  

This community seems not that far from the original (albeit probably mostly mythical) idea of the first Thanksgiving. That is, everyone coming together and bringing something to offer everyone else. However, in 2011, instead of saying, "You bring the squash, I'll bring the corn" it's more like, "you bring the Cool-Whip, I'll bring the (frozen) corn." Every single ingredient for the dinner is donated and the labor that prepares the meal is completely voluntary.

Our church also houses the county's food shelf and my mom was telling me yesterday how awkward she felt earlier in the week when she was in the church basement setting things up and a Native man came in to pick up food to bring up to the local reservation.While we all know that happy story of cooperation between the pilgrims and the American Indian that we base this holiday around is hardly the whole story, as the man left, he called out "Have a nice holiday!" This morning, a member of the local band of Ojibwe was on the radio, explaining how he feels about the holiday. "We like it," he said. "You don't have to go to work. There's lots of foods. It's an opportunity to say 'thanks.'"

So regardless of how Thankgiving really began, we do seem to agree on what today's all about: coming together, celebrating more than enough to go around, and saying "thank you."

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Being Thankful

I went to a Benedictine (Catholic) college. The college shared property with a monastery and it wasn't uncommon to have a nun as a professor. One day, in the class that was supposed to be prepping us for a J-term in Rome, the Father who was teaching the class asked a nun who had recently visited Italy to come speak with us. For whatever reason, we got on the topic of prayer.

"What's the most common prayer?" the nun asked. We all looked at each other. Umm, the Lord's Prayer? The nun cleared her throat. "When we pray, we're usually asking God for something," she explained. "Every once in a while, it's nice to say a prayer that just says 'thank you.'"

It is, isn't it?

Whether you're talking to the man upstairs or whether you're b.s.ing with a friend, sometimes we just need to stop the ongoing, droning monologue about everything we wish we had and step back and realize what we already have. If we don't take a minute to say "thank you" we risk going through life with blinders on and missing the big picture.

So today, I'm saying thank you. Not just because it 'tis the season, but because, truly, I have so many things to be grateful for.

I'm thankful to share my life with a funny, talented, thoughtful man. After more than three years together - two+ spent living together - it's hard to imagine life without my partner in crime: Andy.

I'm thankful to live in a beautiful part of the country, in a lovely little cabin on the edge of a gorgeous lake. (Sorry about all those adjectives.) Seriously, day, every season here in the woods brings something new to marvel at.

I'm thankful for self-sufficiency, for being able to stock our shelves and line our freezers with food we've picked, grown, or hunted. On a similar note, I'm thankful for no credit card debt and limited student loans, which allow us to carve out a simple life all our own. I'm thankful for enough to go around. I'm thankful to have a degree.

I'm thankful for more than enough firewood to keep us warm during the long, dark winter that's nearly upon us.

I'm thankful for enough time for hobbies, be it gardening, knitting, canning, berry picking, writing, or what have you. I'm thank to be able to use my writing as an income source. I'm thankful to have a contract sitting on my desk for employment next summer.

I'm thankful for wonderful and slightly ridiculous friends who remain an important part of my life, even when the miles between us are long. I'm thankful I'm still invited to be a part of these people's lives. I'm thankful for laughter. I'm thankful for the sense of community blogging has created in my life.

I'm thankful to be able to watch things grow. 

I'm thankful for family nearby to provide support, and occasionally, a bed to sleep in. 

I'm thankful for much more, but I wanted to end this before you were thankful that I'd run out of things to be thankful for.

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving season? I'm linking up with the "Give Thanks Party" over at Ashley's, After Nine to Five.

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This Thanksgiving I Knit A Sock

I packed up the Corolla on Wednesday morning and poked my way down the snow-packed Gunflint Trail to start in on the Thanksgiving festivities. I packed up enough clothes for four nights away from the cabin and threw in a bag of knitting that looked like this:

My mother coordinates the annual community Thanksgiving dinner in town, so this is always a busy time of year. I'm just one of many, many volunteers who help to bake pies, roast turkeys, pick up various supplies, set tables, help cook, deliver meals and etc, etc. Somehow I ended up on sweet potato this year which went really well on Wednesday when we were peeling, chopping and parboiling the potatoes, but got a little frantic on Thursday morning.

For the dinner we make a sweet potato recipe ala Better Homes and Gardens circa early 1970s. It involves a syrup of butter, brown sugar and ginger which is added to the sweet potatoes along with peaches and cashews and cooked in a roaster for several hours. I went about making the syrup and kept cooking and cooking the syrup, wanting the sugar granules to completely dissolve, but in actuality making caramel. When I poured the "syrup" over the roasting pan full of cold potatoes, the syrup immediately set up into caramel. I know that "caramelizing" food is seen in a positive light these days, but hunks of caramel mixed in with sweet potatoes was really not what I was hoping for. The roasting pan of sweet potatoes was heaped so full and every time I tried to stir the concoction, bits of peach and potato fell onto the floor. By the time dinner was served at 1:00, the floor around the sweet potato operation was a sticky mess, but the caramel chunks had all dissolved, the potatoes had cooked beautifully, and my folly was forgotten. Whew!

We fed approximately 140 people and by 5:00 all the dishes were washed, the leftovers packed and the tables cleaned up. It was time to put our feet and get a little knitting done before collapsing into bed.

On Friday we set off to the Cities -- clickety clack, clickety clack go the knitting needles on the five hour drive-- to spend time with Andy's family. Time spent with family is often low-key and low-energy and by the time we were driving home from the visit yesterday morning, I had a sock that looks like this:

I know spending an entire long weekend knitting a sock doesn't sound especially impressive. Yet I came home with a bunch of fiction and essay ideas scribbled on a Caribou coffee napkin which I'd stuffed into my knitting bag.

People often stress the need for quiet time for the creative process, but, good Midwestern girl that I am, I sometimes struggle with confusing quiet time with a waste of time. And still, I'm continually frustrated by my lack of fiction ideas.

It's a funny thing about fiction ideas. You don't seem to get any unless you have time to spend sitting around, maybe knitting a sock, thinking about nothing in particular. When you're constantly thinking about what you should be doing or what happens next, your mind whirs past the "what if?" thoughts necessary for spawning fiction writing.

It's a good thing to have time to sit and knit socks.

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving filled with just a touch of drama and lots of quiet, thoughtful time before the holiday season is truly upon us. 

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The Northwoods Puritan

When I was little, we often checked out holiday appropriate picture books from the library. Thanksgiving is a holiday starved for good children's literature, but I do vividly remember one such book. It was called, "Life In The Day of the Pilgrim," or something like that and it basically involved a first Thanksgiving reenactment which had been photographed and turned into a picture book.

By far my favorite part of the whole book was the two-page spread where they showed a young pilgrim girl getting dressed for the day. (Don't worry, they started with their first layer of underclothes on.) Getting dressed when you were a Puritan was a pretty complex process: there were layers upon layers of underclothes, various stockings, overdresses, bonnets, etc. etc. There were at least 14 steps involved in going from your bedclothes to being dressed for the day.

Because I was a really cool young child I liked the idea of having such a methodical dressing routine. When getting ready for Sunday School (the only time I routinely wore a dress and slip as a child) I liked to lay out my tights, slip, dress and shoes and pretend I was Puritan donning my daily layers of clothing. Since getting dressed for church involved only about 1/4 of the clothes necessary for a Puritan, it wasn't a terrible convincing ritual, but at least I was blessed with a good imagination.

Then, the other night, I laid out everything I typically have on when I venture outside on winter days. I'm basically a Northwoods Puritan!

Wherever you are this Thanksgiving, be safe and be happy. Happy Thanksgiving!

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