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| The Family Turkey...Yum! |
How was everyone’s Thanksgiving Holiday? I do hope you had a peaceful day, perhaps spending time with family or friends, perhaps reflection alone and offering gratitude to the cosmos…however it went, I hope it was a good one for you and yours. The Family Chalmers had a very mellow Thanksgiving on The Farmhouse Estate. It was going to be just the four of us but we had a couple of "refugees", a friend of our son who has no family in California joined us as well as a lost, stray beautiful pit bull that wandered onto the property! Since we made a well cooked 12 pound turkey with cornbread dressing, cranberries, pomegranates, potatoes, biscuits with pumpkin and blueberry pies, we had a bountiful to share! It was a family effort to cook the feast, each of us preparing something unique. I made the turkey, basting it with butter, garlic and sage. The kids made potatoes and salads, my wife is a master baker, she made the pie! We set forth our family feast on the rarely used dining room table, we used real dishes too! The house was toasty and smelly so good, the music was groovy and the mood was an easy, relaxed vibe. At last when we ate, it was hearty and with good appetites! The turkey so juicy, the potatoes so creamy, the fruit and salad and the wine so sweet…it was a treat to share it with those I love most often, at home, the four of us, plus a couple of visitors, all gave thanks.
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| Maggie with the stray visitor... |
There have been other great Thanksgiving celebrations in my life, some not too wonderful ones too. Holidays have that potential to bring out the best or the worst, depending on the time, the place, the people…I have selected a few of my favorites which I romance in my memories, Thanksgivings so wonderful they’ll forever live as glorious moments in my life.
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| A Perfect Thanksgiving in 1998, Arkansas |
I have let go of the ghost of those not so great holidays too, those painful Thanksgivings are like the rotted carcass of the turkey we ate long ago, they’re meaningless and irrelevant to the present holiday. I like this tradition we’re starting, since relocating to California, I like the notion of it being just the four of us (although I wish my older son was here too)…and as the kids grow older, as they start families and relationships, let’s keep the holiday here at our home. Maybe. Maybe not, there’s something to be said for arriving to a house clean and smelling good…being treated as a guest, helping if I can, eating like a prince, cleaning up the table and then…we get to leave and don’t have to clean up the big mess! Maybe we’ll alternate, that seems fair, right?
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| Thankful For My G+ Community... |
As this Thanksgiving holiday passes and I reflect upon that which I am thankful for in my life over this past year, one of the elements I am most Grateful for is having this community to support, exchange ideas and feelings and otherwise get to know…it’s been a great year for meeting new folks on-line and some of you I suspect will be friends to me for a long time to come. I only hope that I too can be a good friend to you as well. I came to this platform as something of a refugee from Facebook, I don’t care for that site and since Zuckerberg hates my guts, it’s best I’m not around those parts, right? I adore the Google philosophies, I think their products/services are quite nifty and there are so many great individuals and communities here, so much potential for change (for better or worse) and all in all, for me it’s been a grand experiment in social networking with mostly positive results. Since relocating back to California, for the better part of more than a year, I had an excellent time promoting my book, making friends, helping others, finding help for myself…and I even fell in love too!
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| The Farmhouse on Thanksgiving Morning 2015... |
In conclusion, with this Thanksgiving weekend upon us, as the mad shoppers shop and the football fan get fanatical, I’m simply taking it easy…listening to music, playing with the kids and eating left-overs is a day well spent in my book. I’m getting a lot of work done, by the way, I’m finally making some positive progress with the audio production (although my voice is cashed) and I hope to have the audio files ready by mid-December; either way, they’ll be done and that will be that, right? Again, I wish to extend my most humble, Grateful appreciation for your friendship, your support and interaction over the last so many moments…as we slide towards the end of another year, as things change and the future holds we sometimes desire, things we sometimes fear…I’m here and you’re there, so be it, my friend, be in peace.
