Holiday Guide 2013 - November! Just Chillin’ Redux:
Happy Turkeys in a Santa Rosa Garden! By guest columnist Ellie Schmidt •
eschmidtty@sbcglobal.net
Santa Rosa, CA. ~ Wild turkeys,
a trio--on sur-
prise visit—landed, one smack on the roof and two right in the drive, miss- ing our old, trusty car by a turkey feather, a day before our first Thanksgiving in
Santa Rosa. friendly
to get acquainted with our
Yes, the turkeys got par- doned.
They do sort of
“fly.” More like wad- dling series of leaps. Seems they appear now and again from Annadel State Park, the way occasional deer and
raccoons show up.
Streams of wild honk- ing geese or high-gliding, graceful hawks always grab our attention.
Today an
airy parade of marvelous, angel-wing clouds danced across the blue invert- ed bowl of sky. I am again thankful. The chief cloud- gazer,
Gavin
Pretor-Pinney, with his whim- sical The Cloudspotter’s Guide
started the “Cloud Appreciation Society!” His fun website forgives all of us imaginative kids for “seeing” things in many cloud shapes. Dreaming. Maintaining pure blue skies are boring, his “Cloudy with a chance of joy,” best weather predic- tion, says it all.
After an
early, dense fog lifted a few days ago, the sun revealed all our shrubs and roses covered
with crystal
clear, tiny pearls of glass water droplets. Immensely grateful for that magical sight! Harvest
time and the
Thanksgiving celebration that magnetically draws families and friends close together, approaches. At my age, being thankful is a
profound, daily activ- the Mom
was 20, dad was 21 when they met in New York City.
A
Hungarian musician
friend of my
dad’s, who played honky-tonk piano
accompaniment to silent films at a neighborhood movie theatre, convinced my shy dad to finally ask my mom to see the Charlie Chaplin film, The Kid. He provided free tickets.
The
young couple not only held hands, but when the lights
came on and horrified their
bouncy friend joined them, he was
to see
them hugging and weeping buckets.
“Herr Gott Sakra!”
he blurted out, “Here I thought I’d make you two happy!”
The homesickness is The power of incredible.
Together, the three kept reminiscing about miss- ing their loved ones in Europe.
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ity. Naming all I should like to thank would require volumes. With children and grandchildren so grown up, our “feasts” now please both carnivores and vegans.
we have
But, a
every chance time to get
together with any combina- tion of these young accom- plished people is a true Thanksgiving Day for me. The greatest feastgivers were my parents,--as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about those he admired: they always
cheerfully “found
the best in others and gave the best they had.” Their love and joy was positively conta- gious.
bring them all to America. They did.
And Charlie
Chaplin’s films had a pro- found influence on us all. How thankful I am that
they were my parents. Happy the child who feels daily the power of such love, the strength of encourage- ment, the joy of doing so much together. From my point of view now, I laugh when I
recall how
genuinely excit- ed they were to discover and learn
every bit of homework I was
given. We dis- cussed
every-
thing from as early as I can remember. In turn, I marveled at their love, and use, of languages, of books to be treasured. And music. No family gather- ing was without music after feasts. They all knew a huge number of folk songs from many countries. My dad played mandolin. Others played the vio- lin, guitars, accordion, har- monica, and uninhibited, sang in two and three part harmony.
As the fam-
ily grew it became a mini-United Nations gathering: added to the Austro-Hungarian, German, French, were American, British, Scottish, Ecuador and Chile representation. How they all loved to cook
and eat delicious food! Far better surely than Charlie Chaplin’s gour- met version of the best ever prepared shoe in The Gold Rush.
er compares to Chaplin’s incredible
on
skates in Modern Times. A perfect
Christmas
roller gift
I got then was a pair of clamp-on, ball-bearing, roller skates that I hun- gered for, much the way Ralphie, in the peren- nial
favorite, Christmas
Story, wanted his air rifle. Roller skating became a great passion pursued dili- gently, daily, in Central Park. Unusual conse- quences, but that remains a
story for another time!
erational favorite torte recipe Mocha
Here’s our five gen- for
holidays! Torte --about
eight servings, (if stingy.) 6 eggs separated 6 tablespoons
... continued on page 22
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UPBEAT TIMES • 11
Weird Facts & Trivia - 3 Ordinary citizen Nikola Jovanovic
named the Butterfinger candy
bar. He won a naming contest by sending in his own nickname, which he got for being a klutz.
The town of Derry Church, Pennsylvania, was renamed Hershey to honor Milton Hershey and his candy bar factory.
Philip Silvershein named a pyra- mid candy bar with chocolate, raisins, cashews and Brazil nuts after his granddaughter. The name he gave it: Chunky.
The Wonka bar is a chocolate bar with the word "Wonka" imprinted on it and a graham cracker base. It is named after a fictional candy bar of the same name in the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The short-lived Wonka Xploder bar was released in 1999. It had "tongue crackling candy" inside its milk chocolate that was similar to Pop Rocks.
Have a break … have a Kit Kat, was this candy bar’s slogan for a whopping 47 years.
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