Passin' a good time

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This weekend I passed a good time with my family and friends here: http://www.christmasfestival.com/ , my family's grafted-on hometown. The celebration is pretty secular and uniformly kid-friendly with lots of L.E. NG, and a generally very well-behaved, mixed-race crowd. Day-long activities from old-home tours (Natchitoches is the oldest town in the Louisiana Purchase), plantation tours, parades, American indian crafts demonstrations and sales, yard-art of all sorts, bric-a-brac from hell, ironmongering smiths, jewelry from tawdry to delicate and lovely, food booths, parades for little kids and parades for high school bands. Town of 25K grows to 100K or more sometimes. Get your motel or B&B reservation now for next year, first weekend in December.

All but one of my brothers and sisters (4 of 5), significant others of various gender combinations, numerous grandchildren and step-grandchildren were there as was our 88 y.o. hostess, grande dame, mamere, and tyrannical empress, our Mother. All boxed within a drafty old large house of few rooms. Children aged from toddler twins to disdainful teens all piled into sleeping bags, beds, air mattresses and sofas.

Food was bountiful, heaped on the kitchen table in perpetually shifting, eclectic combinations: Pork roast, crawfish jambalaya, beef stew, field peas, chips, chipotl dip, cheese dip; preserves from strawberries, figs, and ginger marmalade to candied peppers; salads of various combinations, cold cuts, several loaves of home-made bread of different recipes (all delicious and calorie-heavy), BBQ'd pork, soft drinks, 2% milk, water, juices, home-grown oranges, homemade cookies, several bottles of wine, copious quantities of beer (mostly imports, an emerging mini-tradition of one rule: NO elephants on the label).

Music from acoustics or nothing: no hifi. Teens sitting in cars: radio junkies getting junk.

I took leave Friday & today in prep and recovery. Rejuvenative beyond measure. Today we're back in the saddle (except me). School, term papers, final exams, Christmas shopping, house-trimming, and at work, report-writing and research to scrunch-forward a miniscule advance.

Best wishes to you and I hope your holiday season will be as soul-satisfying as mine is shaping-up to be.

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