Sinterklaasavond 2014

Sinterklaasavond, also known as Pakjesavond, the evening of Gouda family, food, and presents. It's a Dutch thing, and if you put your wooden shoes by the front door, and happen to live on a canal, the pakjesboot might glide right up and leave you a chocolate coin, or coal, if you've earned it.

We don't do it quite right in our house. For one thing, the tradition in Europe includes celebrating on the night of December 5, the eve of Saint Nicholas Day, but we celebrate it whenever we find room in our calendars nearest to that date. This year that was today, December 7, but being a few days late didn't hurt our party any. Every year our local family has humored us, joining us for Flemish stew and bringing fun things like Gouda cheese, and Flemish beer and appetizers. It makes this a kind of kick-off party for our season of holiday festivities, and we look forward to it every year.

Another thing that we do wrong is the present giving. We often forget to put out or shoes, or to fill them even if we do, and there are never chocolate coins involved. We do exchange packages that have become a tradition for us, though: every year there are Christmas pajamas, new Christmas music, and a new Christmas book. These are traditions we started when Calvin was born, along with our Sinterklaasavond tradition, and have kept up since. Of course that means we have an embarrassing number of Christmas songs in our collection, and we are running out of room in our Christmas book box, but we love this tradition and have discovered some great art in the process. Who knewthat L. Frank Baum was responsible for much of the literary tradition surrrounding Santa Claus, or that Lou Rawls had released such a great Christmas album that has been buried for decades beneath the plethera of modern pop remakes.

We love our traditions, and how the season most full of them has truly begun.

Holiday thread

The leftovers have been stored (or eaten), the best china cleaned and put away, the family come and gone, photographs snapped to share. Our house Transformed over the Thanksgiving weekend from its fall harvest wear to its Christmas finery.

When I was a child, the holidays felt far apart. They were stand-alone oases in a wide, barren plane of ho-hum days. As an adult, those days slip by so fast that the holidays seem connected. Especially the fall holidays seem to meld Halloween into Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving into St. Nicholas Day into Christmas into New Years, and on into my birthday at the end of January. There is not a day in that stretch that our house is not decorated, lively, and festive, only the color of the embellishments changes.

Thanksgiving for us is a whole weekend affair. It's a holiday of family and food and laughter, a celebration of these things we value most greatly, and it starts with ordering pizza. What does pizza have to do with Thanksgiving, you might ask? It turns out that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Eve, if you will, is the biggest night for carry-out or delivery pizza all year, bigger even than the Super Bowl. We unwittingly participated in this American tradition a few years ago when I was too tired after baking and cleaning to make dinner, and therein lies the tradition's appeal. We have wittingly participated every since, and dragged the family along on many an occasion.

When we are home, our Thanksgiving morning is spent exchanging our Halloween harvest decorations for the bright reds and greens of Christmas while watching Detroit's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And, when we are home, dinner is still traditionally held by my parents, as when I was young it was held by their parents. My dad's turkey, done on the smoker, is moist and flavorful, and our table is always laden by all the favorites everyone has to offer: gravy, stuffing, squash, cranberry relish, cranberry sauce, beans, wine, and, later, pie, pie, pie.

On Friday this year we ate the curried and aromatic Lamb Genghis Kahn, and on Saturday we had our first ever Thanksgiving weekend cook-off, a battle of Carbonara chefs in our kitchen. But, although it sounds so delicious, the best part about the weekend wasn't the food so much as the company. We shopped together, we played games together, we went out to get our tree together, we cooked together.

And the good news is that we get to do it all again at Christmas, which, regardless of what my impatient young self used to think, is really just around the corner.

Cali part 6 (the final hurrah): Gilroy

On our way back to the airport in San Francisco we enjoyed more views of the central valley, and one last hurrah in the tiny town of Gilroy—the garlic capital of the world. Roasted garlic, garlic fries, and garlic burgers oh my.

Cali part 5: Sequoia and Kings Canyon

Yosemite was definitely beautiful, but I think for me Kings Canyon surpassed it. Less traveled and certainly more rural, the drive into Kings Canyon is stunning and precarious. It's also a road to nowhere, literally to "Trail's End", and which point all travelers must turn around and head back over the same treacherous thirteen miles they drove on their way in; Thirteen mile that took over an hour to traverse the first time and will certainly take equally long on the way back, if not more so since now the trip is mostly on the outer lane, the one that seems to be only inches from a catastrophic drop.

It's an amazing and completely worthwhile trip.

On this final day for the parks we saw General Grant and General Sherman (the two biggest trees ever), we drove into and out of the stunning Kings Canyon, and straight through Sequoia in a setting fall sun.

We also saw a bear. A real, honest-to-goodness, big black bear.

He was beautiful.

The trees...they're big.

Kings Canyon: the pictures don't do it justice.

That's our road way down there...

...and way down there, too...

...and that's our road again, hanging precariously off the side of that mountain...

Sequoias are surprisingly spongy on the outside

I have no photographic evidence, but imagine a bear here...

Cali part 4: Yosemite

On Tuesday we hopped in the rental van and headed over the Coastals, through the valley, and into the Sierra Nevadas.

Our drive through the central valley was a serious eye opener. When you stop watering a field here it simply goes feral. Stop watering an orchard there and it goes bone dry dead. We saw both live and dead orchards on our drive, and a dammed lake at all-time low levels. I'd seen pictures of California's disappearing lakes and exposed bridges, but seeing it in person was far more heartbreaking.

Like San Francisco, Yosemite has long been on my bucket list. We arrived in the evening on the first day (after taking a side trip to a lunch spot that the Garmin was adamantly sure was located in thin air on the drop-off side of the winding mountain road), and enjoyed the stunning view from Glacier Point. Our one full day in the park we spent driving the valley floor and taking a couple of short hikes (walk really) to what were, of course, dry waterfalls.

We saw the many faces of Half Dome. We enjoyd drinks at the Ahwahnee and a picnic lunch in a valley floor meadow. With the waterfalls so low we climbed across boulders and into the stream beds. We may not have had time to hike, but the sights were certainly pleasing.

No bears, though.