Thanksgiving Musings

‘Tis the Season and I am sitting before a fire (OK it’s Prescott AZ so it’s a gas fire.) enjoying a second cuppa --a very strong, rich but ‘decaffed’  (My word to avoid all the ie, ei spelling issues, so sue me!) brew, colored with half and half to a mellow hue that works for me, but perhaps not for you.

I just drove 3000 miles to east Texas to visit family, leaving October 30 and back on my birthday Nov. 15, all this well before Thanksgiving, right?  And yet Christmas music, decorations, and demands to buy gifts NOW assaulted the senses all along the way.  Thanksgiving felt as if it received short shrift out in the world of money.  That’s  perhaps just fine with me for I prefer Thanksgiving.  I love the time of year.  Depending on where you live Stateside, you may be in the full throes of autumn colors, flirting with winter or grateful for that first norther that blows into the south and drops temperatures as much as 30 degrees in fifteen minutes.  I love that Thanksgiving gives us few to no reasons to separate ourselves along lines of faith or how we practice our faith.  We can all give thanks without getting in the other person’s face.  

I suppose vegetarians and meat lovers might yammer away at one another.  And there is always the GREAT DEBATE on Yankee stuffing made with stale white bread vs Southern dressing made with stale cornbread—the former tasting gummy and tasteless to southerners and the latter tasting grainy and perhaps just foreign to northerners.  But I noticed at the Ruffner/Markham/Otwell 48 year old, outdoor  Thanksgiving  celebration, the subject did not arise and both styles graced the groaning board.  

This local family tradition begins with Cowboy Coffee, made by matriarch and good friend, Elisabeth Ruffner.   The coffee grounds are tied in a cheese cloth and dropped gently into boiling water.  After steeping to some mysterious point that Elisabeth knows in her bones, you get a coffee that you can’t see through  (Yaaayyy!!) and guaranteed to float a horseshoe and of course when you get home, you have to check for extra hair on your chest.  All this is done over an open fire out in a meadow with mountains scalloping the horizon,  hard blue skies, a light, cooling breeze---ah perfection my friends.  Absolute perfection and we haven’t even gotten to the food, conviviality of old friends, the making of new friends, the chance to feed an apple to one of several horses, the scrunching of a canine guest’s ears.

We were missing a few friends who have passed on, but although we felt their absence we are grateful to have had them in our lives.  So I’m thankful for Thanksgiving—no presents to buy, not many triggers for arguments (sporting events notwithstanding), gorgeous food, family traditions, remembrance of that very first Thanksgiving --when the gratitude perhaps had more at stake, survival itself and the hope and expectation of a new life to create out of an unknown land, but a place made bountiful through the knowledge shared with our forebears by those who had already come before them in their own search for a new life.

I really love Thanksgiving...