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Thanksgiving day semi-comatose blog

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I’ve spent the day alternating between stretching out on the sofa with a book and cleaning the house (or vice versa) in preparation for Saturday’s invasion. I took time this evening to do my bill paying, which I usually do on Thursdays. Since I’ll be able to put them in the mail again tomorrow, I thought I might as well keep up my usual routine.

I have a cheap pocket knife that I’ve been using as a letter opener ever since the old pewter letter opener that belonged to my dad disappeared unaccountably.

I was in the midst of bill paying when I got up to do something (I went to the bathroom, actually, but you don’t want to know that).

When I got back to the desk, the pocket knife was missing. I retraced my steps on the very short trip, and checked all around the desk, and I can’t find the bloody thing anywhere.

I know whom to blame, of course. It’s the elves (or nisser, in Norwegian). It’s always the elves (or nisser, in Norwegian).

What troubles me is that it appears they’re arming themselves…

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Thanksgiving Day Live Blog

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Happy Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, I thought I might live blog my early Thanksgiving morning, which isn’t the right use of the term “live blog” because no one was awake, I had nothing to do, and I doubt you were here wondering when the lit news is coming. The coffee wasn’t even made. I could update you on what’s coming over an antique radio I have behind me. It’s a Japanese made Viscount “Stereo Solid State” with volume control for both left and right speakers and something called “MPX” on the AM/FM switch which seems to enhance the sound for FM radio. I didn’t catch the name of the composer whose music is playing now, but it’s a work about war and peace in Switzerland.

Ah, Copeland’s Rodeo is on the radio now—Classical 90.5 out of Collegedale, TN. Rodeo makes you think of beef, doesn’t it?

Did you see the story reporting the claims of a Floridian historian who says the first American Thanksgiving was in St. Augustine. Spanish Explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles landed in St. Augustine on September 8, 1565. He claimed “Florida for the Spanish crown and participat[ed] in a special Mass of Thanksgiving given by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales. After being declared governor of the new land, Menendez invited the Timucua natives to join the Spanish in a Thanksgiving feast.”

Susan Brandenburg reports, “A flurry of national attention followed the reporter’s article about Gannon’s book, with a number of irate New Englanders dubbing Gannon ‘the grinch who stole Thanksgiving.’ In fact, Gannon poured literary salt in their wounds by remarking, with a chuckle in his voice, “’In the year 1621, when the Pilgrims were having their first Thanksgiving, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.’”

I don’t see why this should ruffle anyone’s feathers, but then I don’t understand why so many will argue for their dog in a fight when they have no personal investment and winning an argument will mean nothing at the end of the day. That’s why I don’t favor one sport team over another.

Anyway Lars said yesterday, we have much to be thankful for. Today, I’m thankful for the rain that fell yesterday evening. The southeast needs a lot of it, and I see rain south of us in middle and south Georgia. That’s a blessing. Perhaps the Lord will not take us through a very dry valley into next summer, but even if he does, I know he will leave us. He will not leave his people, that is, because He works all things together for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose—those whom he foreknew and predestined to be conformed to his image. All things, like droughts and freakish jellyfish attacks on Irish salmon farms.

That’s a huge thing to give thanks for. Bryan Chapell preached a great sermon on prayer which touches on this idea (MP3 link).

What else might an American Christian thank the Lord for today? Good coffee comes to mind, but I’ve drunken all I brewed this morning. Other things? Good roads, stable houses, reliable heating and air conditioning, reliable transportation in various forms. Plenty of food of all kinds. Computers and networks for writing and talking to each other regardless the distances. These are blessings from the Lord of heaven and earth. Because people in our have respected the Lord’s commands, generally speaking, we expect people to keep their commitments, to do a job properly, to deal with us honestly. I know we have become more cynical of these things, and buyer beware is still a good principle, but I wonder if our justifiable cynicism comes to us as our countrymen drift toward a secular mindset and liberal doctrines.

Maybe if we “undertake for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country” our lives in this country, as the Mayflower pilgrims did, we would see more hope for the future of this life as well as hope in the life to come.

I think I’m hearing the foreshadowing toll of the dinner bell. I must go.

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Your annual Thanksgiving guilt trip

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Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving, Faithful Reader. I don’t have any particular plans for the day, but pity me not. My brothers and their families will be gathering here at Blithering Heights for a feast on Saturday. Once again I shall test myself against the wily domestic turkey, to learn which of us is the better man.

I may post over the long weekend. Or I may not.

I have several things to say about Thanksgiving, and they don’t all hang together terribly well. But when has that ever stopped me?

For some reason I’ve been thinking today about the old people of my childhood. Not merely my parents. Not even my grandparents (who are much missed, one and all). I’m thinking of the really old people I met in church as a child, incredibly tall people (from my perspective) who dressed in a formal manner, moved slowly, spoke with accents, and seemed possessed of the wisdom of the ages.

And in a way they were.

Those were people who grew up in a world full of Civil War veterans. They clearly remembered the Spanish-American War, and high buttoned shoes, and gentlemen in derbies and handlebar mustaches. They remembered a time when you measured distance (to loosely quote C.S. Lewis) by the time it took to walk from one place to another (or at least the time it took to go in a wagon or buggy).

Some of them were immigrants. They remembered what it meant to come to a country where it didn’t matter what class you were born in, or what your father had done for a living. In America, you could be anything you wanted to be!

They remembered times of being genuinely uncertain whether the summer’s food would get you through the winter. They remembered prairie fires, and locust clouds, and diphtheria epidemics.

They remembered times when things to read were hard to come by. When you got your hands on a book, or a magazine or a newspaper, you read it front to back and then read it again. And then thought about it. Because it might be a while before you got anything more to read.

They were probably all racists, by our contemporary standards. They thought going to theaters and dancing were mortal sins. They thought America started going downhill when we ended Prohibition.

But all in all, I think they were better people than we are. They’d experienced life in a skin-to-skin, scratchy, smelly, painful manner from which we’re far removed today. They knew how to be thankful, because they’d lived with genuine want.

I miss them. I wish they were here to celebrate Thanksgiving with us; to influence us to be quieter, more reverent, more grateful.

Unfortunately, they’re gone.

All you’ve got to bring you down today is me.

And if that’s not something to be thankful for, I don’t know what is.

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Thanksgiving Links

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Thomas J. Craughwell writes, “If Only the Pilgrims Had Been Italian.”

When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, lobsters were so common all you had to do was stroll down to the nearest tidal pool and pluck them out by the bushel. But the Pilgrims wanted meat, not fish — not even fish as succulent as lobster. Very quickly familiarity bred contempt: The better class of colonists scorned the crustacean as suitable only for the poor. In his journal for the year 1622, William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, recorded the landing of a boatload of new colonists from England. Their arrival was a thrilling event, yet Bradford confessed that he and his fellow Plymouth residents were humiliated that they had nothing better to offer the newcomers than lobster.

Also on The American Spectator, Jay D. Homnick riffs on Georgia’s prayer for rain. “Pray today, give thanks tomorrow. Remember also that prayer is not only a means to an end, as Maimonides explains, it must catalyze each of us into reflecting upon our priorities,” he writes.

“God said, I am tired of kings, / I suffer them no more;” Emerson has an interesting poem here, Boston Hymn.

Gaius writes about the Pilgrims early attempts to live communally. This appears to be within the first seven years of their landing in America. According to what I’m reading, the pilgrims’ voyage was funding by London investors who required they work for them for seven years doing whatever profitable work they could find. At the end of those years, the survivors would receive a small share of the profits, but everything belonged to “the common fund” or that of the investors. Even the clothes they wore were owned technically by the men in London. Perhaps that’s why the colony started with a communal attitude.

Now, a little holiday advice: If you start feeling like this little guy, throw out your inhibitions and do something different. Take that walk. Eat that brussel sprout. Whatever you don’t normally do, do it. (Cute warning alert)

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Early Sesame Street a Bit Scary for Modern Viewers

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Living in the Trash CanEarly Sesame Street is a bit scary for modern viewers, modern viewers being unrealistic wimps. Virginia Heffernan writes in the NY Times:

Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole. . . .

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart . . .

She says the street was dirty. Oscar the Grouch could be depressing. No one was really all that chipper, except maybe Ernie who also seemed a bit slow on the uptake.

The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.

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Nordic news for you

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It happened today. The Devil’s Confetti. The Pillow Fight Aftermath From H*ll.

It snowed.

Not much. Just for a few minutes. But I looked out the window and the white stuff was whirling in a vortex of low pressure in the parking lot. If this were a zombie movie, this would be the scene where the chicken is found nailed to the door, sending the symbolic message, “We know where you live, and your feeble science has no power to save you from our malice.”

Every year that passes, the summer seems shorter.

Fortunately, the winters seem shorter too.

But not as short as the summers.

Thanks to Phil for forwarding the news to me: The Chicago Viking Ship, for which I agitated in this space a while back, has won a preservation grant, thanks in part to your votes. The site is a little vague as to exactly how much money will be forked over, but the ship project is in the top tier.

I don’t often see good news from Denmark, but I’m happy to report that a center-right coalition won the parliamentary elections there Tuesday. “Center-right” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Denmark as it does in America, but it’s still good news, from my slanted perspective.

I’ve largely written off Europe. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the old Europe, the one we loved from the movies, is gone forever. But perhaps a few things can be saved. Perhaps it won’t become an Islamic continent. Perhaps the Europeans are beginning to notice that the wonderful new world they’ve been promised doesn’t match the reality developing around them. “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” after all, is a Danish story.

What they really need, in my opinion, is a return to Christ. But, as the Lord Himself noted, it’s harder for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom. Prosperity, it seems to me, is Europe’s big problem.

America’s too.

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Myers and Jacobs on Pullman

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Ken Myers and Alan Jacobs talk about Philip Pullman’s books, which sound worse the more I hear about them. Beautifully imagined, but unfulfilling and not so much fantasy as argument for religious anarchy. Whether The Golden Compass is toned down or spun out enough to be acceptable to most audiences, it sounds as if the two sequels will have to depart from the books a great deal, especially the third.