Thanksgiving: Journey of the Pies

I've already written a serious reflection about Thanksgiving.  This post chronicles a less serious, but no less important issue.  Kristine and Carol agreed that our contribution to the Thanksgiving meal would be the dessert: a cheesecake, a pumpkin pie, and an apple pie.  This gave Kristine a chance to bake the cheesecake, which she's been wanting to do.  It also allowed her to contribute food without transporting tons of fixings that require preparation in someone else's kitchen.

In the back of both of our minds, and in the forefront of our discussion Thursday night before our trip was an important question.  How exactly are we going to transport these desserts?  Transporting them for a 3 hour trip would require some creativity if we were in the US with access to our various kitchen gadgets.   The stakes get raised since we're in the UK with limited gadgets.  Fortunately, Kristine's ingenuity was up to the task.

Step 1 involved repurposing a couple of Cheerio boxes for the pies, and a pair of raggedy old tights and a couple of pans from the oven for the cheesecake.

Step 2 involved careful placement in the cargo bay of the Golf.

Step 3 involved making the trip from Melbourne to Swindon without damage to our valuable cargo.  This shouldn't have been a problem, except we had an adventure with a bridge on a country road while driving well after dark.  Said adventure involved a bump that nearly sent us airborne and invoked different responses from my passengers.  Clare exclaimed "That was fun!" while Kristine remarked "I hope the pies are okay."

Turns out there was no need for concern.  The desserts survived the trip with no ill effects.  The cheesecake emerged from its tightly-bound pan to receive its topping of black currents.

The pies, despite being unceremoniously stuffed into empty Cheerio boxes, emerged with fully appetizing surfaces in tact.

  

Thanksgiving: Finding A New Story

I’ve had a tenuous relationship with Thanksgiving for many years now.  As a college student whose family was overseas, I resented a festival that hammered home the fact that I didn’t have a home to go to.  Several families welcomed me into their homes, but I internalized a message that I was an outsider at their celebrations.  I hadn’t yet learned how to think about accepting the gift of hospitality that these families offered me.  As a young professional who was trying out different lines of liberal thinking, I resented the conspicuous consumption of large quantities of food.  When our first child died in 2004, my resentment turned even stronger.  We should have been celebrating a new baby in our home during Thanksgiving.  Instead we were grieving two dead children and wondering if parenthood was a lost dream.

Kristine has been part of my life through much of this tenuous relationship.  She has born the brunt of many of my critical ponderings about Thanksgiving.  She has allowed me to vent, but also gently tried to help me see Thanksgiving in a more positive light.  For some people it is tied, however incompletely through varied storytelling through the centuries, to a strong sense of national identity.  As one who struggles to call any single place home, I can appreciate that sense of rootedness.  It is a time when people who rarely see each other during the year can get together.  This can be contentious.  But it can also be great fun.  I’ve witnessed how much her extended family truly enjoys each other’s company.  When your language of giving love is to care for your family, preparing a special meal is less about conspicuous consumption then it is showing your children and grandchildren that you care for them.  I am learning to receive those acts of love, even if I wonder why you would ruin a perfectly good apple by putting it into a pie.

The memories of loneliness and pains of grief return every year, but Kristine’s patient encouragement through the years has helped me reach a point of being at peace during Thanksgiving.

2014 has given me a chance to consider Thanksgiving in a different light.  Since we’re in the UK, the girls are in school and I’m at work on Thanksgiving Day.  We’ll spend the weekend in Swindon with the Oldfields, who graciously invited us to help them celebrate a festival that gets very little attention in the UK.  Our Thanksgiving story this year has an awful lot to do with friends like the Oldfields who have opened their lives to a small family that is learning how to live in a foreign land.  Beneath the battles of revisionist historians across the opinionated spectrum, there is a story of giving thanks for people in a foreign land who received help.  That's a story worth celebrating, a story worth telling, and a story worth embodying.  Indeed, it rings out through the Old Testament prophetic tradition: Remember that you were strangers and aliens.  Care for the stranger and the alien among you.

I was a stranger and an alien in the US for many years.  For most of those years, I resented a Thanksgiving festival that reminded me how much I didn't belong.  My family and I are strangers and aliens in the UK this year.  Part of the story is familiar to me: we are celebrating Thanksgiving in a home that is not my own.  But this year the story is different.  I am celebrating Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving 2014 around the table in the Oldfield home

2014 Remembrance Day Parade

Well, the blog has been dormant for many weeks now.  All sorts of reasons for that.  Most of them excuses.  At any rate, in an attempt to get myself back into a writing routine, here's a short post about the recent Remembrance Day festival in Melbourne.

Remembrance Day commemorates the end of hostilities in World War I.  Technically it's on November 11, since hostilities ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  The US designates November 11 as Veterans Day to acknowledge a broader scope than WWI, but the associated festivities are typically done on Memorial Day in May.

Remembrance Day had special significance this year because it marks 100 years since the beginning of WWI.  I got involved with the festival in Melbourne through Melbourne Town Band, for which I play trombone.  The band has strong ties with the local chapter of the Royal British Legion.  They lead the parade, several of the members have other roles (parade master, standard bearer), and they play a concert at the local British Legion Club afterwards.

Melbourne is not a large community.  Although it's technically a town because it has a charter, folks who live here refer to it as a village.  The parade had 500 participants and observers along the street.  Here's a photo of the band leading the parade down the main street in the village.

We marched through the town to the Parish Church (I took this photo of the war memorial and all the wreaths that were laid about a week later when Kristine and I were out for a walk).  Along the way we encountered a bus approaching the parade on the same street from the opposite direction.  The quick-thinking police officer who was walking up front with the band motioned it to the bus-stop on the street.  Fortunately there was time for the bus to pull in before the parade needed to pass.

The actual ceremony for laying wreaths was relatively short.  We started with the traditional cornet solo piece, The Last Post.  The band played a handful of songs while wreaths were laid by different organizations from in and around Melbourne.  We finished with My Country 'Tis of Thee God Save Our Gracious Queen.  This photo below gives an idea of what the area around the memorial looked like.  It was packed.

Once the ceremony was done, the parade re-assembled in front of the monument and marched back to its starting point at the Royal British Legion.

We took a different route on the way back.  It included playing while marching up hill, which I found to be more than a little bit tiring.  Fortunately we didn't have to do it much.  In the photo below, the band director is raising his baton to signal the drummer to give the band the short rolls that cue'd us to start playing again.

Here's the whole route for the parade, along with the locations I had to plug in to force Google to create it.  I haven't participated in equivalent memorial activities like this one before, although I know they exist.  It was a privilege to see how the small community of Melbourne came together for it.