We’ve been home from our Thanksgiving week trip for almost a week now, but once I got back into the swing of work and chores, I never did get around to blogging about the last few days, so I thought I’d finish that before switching gears.
Black Friday
On Friday morning Beth and I lingered at the hotel long enough to have a soak in the hot tub after breakfast. It seemed it would be a waste to stay there five days and not use it. We showed up at Beth’s mom house in the late morning and took separate walks in snow flurries that persisted on and off all day and gave the day a festive feel. (The snow never did stick in Beth’s mom’s neighborhood, but when we went back to our hotel that night there was a dusting there. Wheeling is a hilly town and apparently it has microclimates.)
Most of us ate Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch and then Noah and I finished The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and Beth went ice skating at Wheeling Park. In the mid-afternoon, Beth, North and I left to do a little Christmas shopping. We went to the Artisan Center and Centre Market. We got a few small gifts for my niece Lily-Mei, who at eleven and a half is redecorating her room in a goth theme. This turned out to be the holiday project I didn’t know I needed. Maybe because it seemed more like Halloween than Christmas it was the only gift buying that interested me (and even now it’s the only gift buying I’ve done). We got some little figurines of cats in goth outfits, a painting of a raven, and picked out a wooden statue of another raven (though by the time we returned to that store to buy it, it had closed).
We went into a vintage clothes and record shop to look for a warmer winter coat than North currently owns. Since the thin down coat that served them for a couple winters in Maryland seemed to be about right for November in Ohio, they suspected they will need something heavier for winter, but they couldn’t find anything at this store. Next, we stopped at a coffee kiosk and got a half-sweet gingerbread latte for me and chai for North and headed home.
When we got home, Beth’s mom was watching a WVU-Arizona basketball game (WVU won) and then Beth, North, and I watched an episode of Gilmore Girls. Beth went to pick up pizza for us to eat in front of Hot Frosty, which was Noah’s pick for a Hallmark-type Christmas movie. It was just what you’d expect from this kind of movie. I don’t think I need to say more.
Small Business Saturday
In the morning, Noah and I started Dracula. I taught this book for years in my horror class and I’m deeply gratified to be sharing it with him. We went out for lunch at Later Alligator. (The promise of crepes was how we enticed Noah out of the house for the first time in a few days.) I didn’t read the description of my crepe carefully enough and when it arrived, I was a little dismayed to find it had white rice in it because rice tends to spike my blood sugar and unlike a lot of other things I was eating that week, it wasn’t worth the splurge. I did my best to eat around it.
We met up with Beth’s mom for more Christmas shopping at the Schrader Environmental Center gift shop in Oglebay park. Because of the rice and because I wasn’t really in a good headspace for more Christmas shopping, I decided to take a walk in the park while everyone else shopped. Next, we proceeded to the park lodge coffeeshop for coffee and pastries. Beth and I had noticed lavender lattes there earlier in the week and they are North’s favorite, which was part of the reason we returned. (Thanks to the walk, my blood sugar was low enough so that I was able to have half a slice of gingerbread cake.)
Back at the house I did laundry and made cranberry applesauce out of our apple-turkey centerpieces and some leftover cranberries. But before dinner, we headed out to Oglebay to drive through the light show. We haven’t been to Wheeling for Thanksgiving or Christmas for a long time—this was the last time—because in recent years we’ve been going to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and Blackwater for Christmas, so we haven’t been to the light show in nine years either, though when the kids were small we went almost every year.
I think a lot of people who live in Wheeling think of the Festival of Lights as a touristy thing, and find the traffic it attracts annoying, but I am quite fond of it. It’s been around for forty years, and I probably went for the first time in the late eighties or early nineties, so I’ve seen it grow bigger and bigger. I like seeing the old familiar lights, like the candles surrounded by poinsettias, and the newer LED displays. I only took one picture and didn’t ask Noah to take any because it’s hard to take pictures from a moving vehicle and I didn’t want ask Beth to stop the car repeatedly. I knew which one I wanted, though.
Back when North was in preschool and knew their letters but couldn’t read, they used to insist every word that started with a J was their name because their birth name started with a J. So, the year they were two and a half, when we drove through the Festival of Lights, they saw the word JOY and got very excited about seeing their name in lights, so to speak. For years afterward it became a family joke to say the sign said North’s old name. But we hadn’t been through since North changed their name and when I said, “Look, it says North,” everyone laughed.
There are several tunnels made of lights along the route, and these fixtures also inspired nostalgia. I reminisced about how the kids used to try to hold their breath in them. The tunnels are not long but when traffic is slow, which it generally is, it takes a long time to get through them. I remembered how this used to lead to conflict and tears. When they were nine and fourteen for instance, when Noah was trying to hold his breath and North wasn’t, he claimed they had “forfeited” and he had won, which made them mad. So, at the next tunnel, North retaliated by breathing as loudly as they could to torment him while he tried to hold his breath. Reminded of this tradition, of course, both of them held their breath and it took so long to get through one of the tunnels I thought they would pass out, but they didn’t. And no one cried, so I guess that’s improvement.
That night after a dinner of leftovers and cranberry applesauce, Carole came over to say goodbye because we were leaving the next morning.
Advent
Even though I am not Catholic, it always pleases me when Advent starts on December 1 and the little chocolate-dispensing calendars are accurate. This was one of those years. We didn’t buy an Advent calendar this year, but I thought of it anyway.
On Sunday we were one the road for fourteen hours, first driving North back to Oberlin, making a lunch stop there, and then driving from Oberlin home. On arriving in Oberlin, we helped North carry their luggage up to their third-floor room and they hung some ornaments they’d asked us to bring from home on the tree in the Keep lounge.
Next, we stopped at a grocery store to get them some food because meals were not starting up at Keep for another day and a half and we had brunch at a restaurant in town. Everyone but me got pancakes—sweet potato-cranberry for Noah, chocolate chip for Beth, and blueberry for North. I had a broccoli-quinoa omelet, salad, half the potatoes that came with my meal, and some hot tea, and I did not feel too deprived. I put this photo of Beth and the kids at the restaurant on Facebook and North saw it and texted me, “I like this picture where none of us are smiling and only Beth is looking at the camera.” Believe it or not it was the best of four pictures I took.
After eating we took North back to Keep and said our goodbyes. It was not nearly as hard as when we left them there in August, partly because we’re getting used to being apart but mostly because we were going to see them again in less than two weeks when they come home for winter break. (And now it’s less than a week.)
If Advent is a time of waiting for joyful things, even in dark days, it truly has begun.