Another year older, not a bit wiser
New Year's Eve passed by as it always does-fairly boring and uneventful. I stayed at my parents' house last night, sluggishly cleaning up until quite late and finally decided to just stay the night and sleep on the couch and help Mom finish cleaning up the next day. I had an odd dream this morning that I may ponder over later in another post. I also cooked pancakes and quite accidentally achieved Pancake Nirvana through the creation of the most zen pancakes ever.
Our family gets together and celebrates Christmas on New Year's Day. So New Year's Day will actually be celebrated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day :B no but seriously this has been an ongoing tradition for quite a number of years now, started out of necessity because everyone in the crowd is sort of hither and yon on Christmas itself. I was hoping against hope we could hold this in my house but ALAS it did not happen this year. It was still nice, though. As Southern tradition dictates, we had collards, black eyed peas (in a hoppin' john that my aunt made) and pork. Peas for pennies, collards for dollars, and pork ostensibly for luck in the coming year. Although it could be argued that it's not lucky for the pig OH-HOH BUT I AM SUCH A WIT.
After dinner we opened presents or rather flung them at each other (the Tossing of the Nonbreakable Presents being an old and time-honored tradition in our family) and I recieved a little Feng Shui dictionary, a pretty little japanese girl statuette, earrings and the book " The Invention of Hugo Cabret " which is an awesome book and beautifully illustrated.
Afterwards the women of the family took a trip to the graveyard where my grandfather is buried and placed a holiday wreath and a little gold-sparkled sign saying " Peace " on his gravestone. Someone, we didn't know who, had placed a pot of ponsettias on his grave. Someone always comes around during the holidays and decorates the graves, even those whose names are long lost to the centuries. We milled around a little bit in the chill of the deepening evening, talking to each other and I wandered around studying the gravestones. There's several beautiful ones there, some dating back from the mid 1800's, a few sad wooden ones with the names long worn off and a tumble-down fenced-in area of very old gravestones where a family is buried that died in an epidemic. I stood for a while gazing down at one gravestone where one ancestor was buried, a woman that my aunt had been named after. Her grave was covered with seashells, gray and pockmarked with age, shells that someone, who knows who they were had gathered carefully all those centuries ago and arranged in a mound over her. It was sobering to ponder the years since my grandfather has passed away, thinking about yet another Christmas and New Year's without him. I was a little sad but in that graveyard it was peaceful and quiet. They were all there, family and friends we knew, some we never did but nevertheless they are ours, they belong to us. They're kin.
This too is tradition.
I took everyone on a grand tour of the empty house and we had great fun, especially my aunt who hadn't seen the inside of the house. We walked around and I chatted with my aunt and mom and mused over furniture arrangements and book shelves and general fussy little things that were just fun to gab about. I plopped down on the Most Comfortable Loveseat Ever (yes that is it's official title) and thought of how awesome everything would look once it was all arranged and cleaned up. I'm really looking forward to it. The official closing will happen in a few more weeks and I'm going to grab a few vacation days and do some moving. I've been carrying a couple of boxes of books around in my backseat for months now, just because I didn't know where in the heck to put them until moving day.
And since it still feels like Christmas, dangit, have this hilarious video. BAH HUMBUG. hahaha oh JibJab why you so funny
May 2010 bring you peace, happiness, success and most importantly, pancakes <3
Our family gets together and celebrates Christmas on New Year's Day. So New Year's Day will actually be celebrated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day :B no but seriously this has been an ongoing tradition for quite a number of years now, started out of necessity because everyone in the crowd is sort of hither and yon on Christmas itself. I was hoping against hope we could hold this in my house but ALAS it did not happen this year. It was still nice, though. As Southern tradition dictates, we had collards, black eyed peas (in a hoppin' john that my aunt made) and pork. Peas for pennies, collards for dollars, and pork ostensibly for luck in the coming year. Although it could be argued that it's not lucky for the pig OH-HOH BUT I AM SUCH A WIT.
After dinner we opened presents or rather flung them at each other (the Tossing of the Nonbreakable Presents being an old and time-honored tradition in our family) and I recieved a little Feng Shui dictionary, a pretty little japanese girl statuette, earrings and the book " The Invention of Hugo Cabret " which is an awesome book and beautifully illustrated.
Afterwards the women of the family took a trip to the graveyard where my grandfather is buried and placed a holiday wreath and a little gold-sparkled sign saying " Peace " on his gravestone. Someone, we didn't know who, had placed a pot of ponsettias on his grave. Someone always comes around during the holidays and decorates the graves, even those whose names are long lost to the centuries. We milled around a little bit in the chill of the deepening evening, talking to each other and I wandered around studying the gravestones. There's several beautiful ones there, some dating back from the mid 1800's, a few sad wooden ones with the names long worn off and a tumble-down fenced-in area of very old gravestones where a family is buried that died in an epidemic. I stood for a while gazing down at one gravestone where one ancestor was buried, a woman that my aunt had been named after. Her grave was covered with seashells, gray and pockmarked with age, shells that someone, who knows who they were had gathered carefully all those centuries ago and arranged in a mound over her. It was sobering to ponder the years since my grandfather has passed away, thinking about yet another Christmas and New Year's without him. I was a little sad but in that graveyard it was peaceful and quiet. They were all there, family and friends we knew, some we never did but nevertheless they are ours, they belong to us. They're kin.
This too is tradition.
I took everyone on a grand tour of the empty house and we had great fun, especially my aunt who hadn't seen the inside of the house. We walked around and I chatted with my aunt and mom and mused over furniture arrangements and book shelves and general fussy little things that were just fun to gab about. I plopped down on the Most Comfortable Loveseat Ever (yes that is it's official title) and thought of how awesome everything would look once it was all arranged and cleaned up. I'm really looking forward to it. The official closing will happen in a few more weeks and I'm going to grab a few vacation days and do some moving. I've been carrying a couple of boxes of books around in my backseat for months now, just because I didn't know where in the heck to put them until moving day.
And since it still feels like Christmas, dangit, have this hilarious video. BAH HUMBUG. hahaha oh JibJab why you so funny
Click to viewMay 2010 bring you peace, happiness, success and most importantly, pancakes <3