Opinion

Rob Perez I’m confused. I thought a Christmas tree already had a theme. It’s right there in the name. It’s not a tree. It’s a… Login to continue reading Login…

We had a couple of summery days in November in New York but now, thank goodness, summer is over and we can get back to business. Thanksgiving is done and we spent it with talkative friends and since I was brought up to believe it’s impolite to interrupt, I sat through a two-hour dinner saying nothing but “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really.” And on Sunday I stepped out into a bitter cold wind and walked to church. It felt good.

One of our traditions every single Thanksgiving is making my Grandma Pat’s “green jell-o”. Grandma Pat, having been from the south, had a very special version of Thanksgiving dinner that included a corn bread stuffing, and as a child I was fairly convinced that in the south, it’s a real thing to cook everything to the point of being nearly powder.

According to one famous Christmas song that is for some reason named, “The Christmas Song”, the season is long on chestnuts, Jack Frost, yuletide carols, and, for some reason, though I’ve personally never seen it myself, folks dressed up like Eskimos.

My mother, Grace, and her sister Elsie were lifelong best friends, two adjacent younger girls in a family of 13, and our two families had Thanksgiving together every year, usually at Elsie’s house because she was the better cook, a perfectionist, whereas Mother had six kids, four of us boys, which didn’t encourage perfection.

I like bananas.

My grandmother is still on a mission.

Most words come and go.

When I moved into a house with windows, out of a basement apartment, one of the things I most looked forward to was not only having natural light surrounding me, but the fact that I could now have plants.The house came with a variety of plants, and very soon, I was gifted many more plants.

Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter.