Black Friday

I've come to the conclusion that my favorite holiday may, in fact, be the day after Thanksgiving. It's not that I don't like Thanksgiving itself--I do, very much. I have no problem with the family project of putting on a huge meal, or with first-time-around mashed potatoes, or with well-loved stories tossed over my aunt's epic centerpieces. But, to me, the wreckage of the next day is even better: food and family, deliberately de-ceremonialized, is where the real fun happens.

My family does a Thanksgiving sleepover model--we're divided into Thanksgiving West in Santa Cruz and Thanksgiving East in New York, but both incarnations involve staying over, so that Black Friday is all about the morning-after sleep-in, leftover pie for breakfast, and hanging around the kitchen together. On the West Coast, we sometimes take a walk on the beach, or go downtown for lunch before everybody wanders home. It's more of each other than we've seen all year, usually, and there's time to talk and hang out and be who we are when it's not a major holiday. It's a good time.

This year, I went to Thanksgiving East, and spent Black Friday fighting a cold, but also sprawling on the couch with my brother, knitting, and assembling my Christmas list. We grazed on turkey sandwiches (cranberry + Grey Poupon for me; some kind of mayo thing for him). We hung out with my aunt and uncle. Eventually, we mustered the energy to leave the house and see Fantastic Mr. Fox; then we came home and sprawled some more and we all watched an old Poirot Mystery until bedtime. That's it. It was nothing, but it was great--it was us being together, with nothing else to do and nothing else expected of us, and that's a great holiday memory.

Plus, you know. Pie.

Side ponytails, unite!

When I was a little girl, my brother Ben and I had a club. We were the Tiger Club (tigers being both intimidating and pleasingly stripey), and mostly I remember having meetings via flashlight in Ben's closet, and plotting to build periscopes out of hand mirrors and paper-towel rolls, and always having to make up a new secret handshake because we'd forgotten the old one. Our parents inexplicably would not let us get a tiger to be our mascot; when I was six or seven, we eventually bargained them down to a turtle (practically the same thing anyway, you know) for which we saved up for months and then changed our club name to match. As you do. Scooter the turtle, I will have you know, was a fine and noble mascot for many years, and I think taught us all a lot about the joys of heat lamps and live crickets.

Last week, I picked my brother up at the airport--he's back in the States after five years abroad, and local to me for the first time since middle school. Thus begins the longest, most awesome Turtle Club meeting ever! He's so excited to be back in the land of pork and uncensored movies, and I am so excited to have him here for general bothering/fun-having purposes, even if it means driving him to every furniture store in the greater DC area until his apartment is furnished (I have a car; he does not). You can guess what we did this weekend.

So what I mean to say, I guess, is this: If you come to DC and it does not seem quite the same as it was, if it seems slightly more awesome and yet also slightly more weird, think of us, and know that the Turtle Club is hard at work.

Now, if we can just find enough hand mirrors, we can finally finish those periscopes.

12 of 12: April

Extra double bonus points for the twelfth falling not only on a weekend, but on a major religious holiday (...that I celebrate)! This is so much better than eight pictures of my desk, three of my meals, and one (invariably) of me watching Jon Stewart. I hope you agree. Also, I'm out of my photographic element, visiting family in Armonk, NY for the weekend.

For more 12 of 12 info and/or madness, check out Chad Darnell's blog.



7:55 - Happy Easter! He is risen! I, however, am not. Yet.




8:23 - The guest room (slash my cousin's old bedroom) at my aunt and uncle's house. I love staying here.




8:39 - Ready for church. Neither snow nor sleet nor 40-degree weather will keep me from wearing my new sundress, sans nylons, this morning. Little did you know that my feet have mysteriously disappeared.




8:56 - On the road to church with my aunt.




9:02 - Easter lilies. I've always liked how lilies are kind of a messy flower--their pollen gets everywhere.




11:15 - You will know the Presbyterians by the mostly-empty trays of goodies they leave in their wake. (Totally a good reason to go Presbyterian, by the way.)




11:30 - The upside to having church in a gym: after-service hockey! Pots of Easter flowers make excellent goalposts, as any church kid will tell you.




12:03 - It is a truth universally acknowledged that it must be freezing on Easter, but at least we got plenty of sunshine. (Note the complete lack of leaves on the tree, though. Spring is still half asleep up here.)




3:36 - Easter lunch detritus in the kitchen.




4:28 - Checking in on various Easters back home, and wondering whether they'd wait for me if I ran to the airport now. Triple-timing, bicoastal Easter would be awesome, don't you think? Oh, to have spring break again.




6:00 - My portable knitting, the Lace Ribbon Scarf. We're making up slowly after I made a mistake a tiny yarny fight. I may have been giving it the cold shoulder, a bit.




6:42 - After a major holiday, we do just what every red-blooded American family would: sit around with our leftover hors d'oeuvres and our BBC costume dramas and our yarn (well, that part's just me). Doesn't everybody?



Happy (day after) Easter, all. See you May 12 if not before.