As Seasons Collide!

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrate! I honestly thought this pandemic would be over by now but at least it's not as bad as last year. Hope everyone stayed safe and had the best holiday they could manage under the circumstances. Thank goodness for happy plastic skeletons!    

After summer just kept on going, it was nice when autumn stuck around awhile longer, too. Unfortunately, that all came to an abrupt end when winter decided to show up on Thanksgiving.

Bright blue skies and white snow (not covered in leaves) goes a long way in cheering up the normal gloom of November - plus it provides the perfect conditions for a snowball fight!   

Since the temperatures will be plummeting into single digits overnight it was time to pick anything that was still alive in the garden. It was a pretty pathetic harvest, ha! Good thing we didn't try chucking these cabbages at each other instead of snowballs, they're hard as rocks. 

Of the four very small pumpkins that actually ripened, only this one turned out to be orange, the other three were white. It's not what I expected but it's better than nothing. His Madness bought a butternut squash to make the "pumpkin" pie for Thanksgiving dinner so it might end up as bread.

On the other hand, the Ghost peppers flourished! There's nothing like a bumper crop of unbearably hot capsicums in various stages of ripeness! This is the final harvest from the lone seedling I planted late last spring. It produced tons of these rough, twisted firecrackers that changed colors several times as they grew. I don't remember ever getting so many peppers from just one plant before. How about some spicy pumpkin cabbage soup? Or maybe not.

Burt found his hat in the Turkey Day "decorations" box, there's definitely not a lot to work with otherwise. I think of Thanksgiving as one of those "Triple C'" type holidays, where it's basically all about cooking, cleaning, and calculating! That last "C" is the trickiest - estimating the number of guests you have invited versus the number that you think will actually show up (with or without an extra guest . . . or more!), compared to the number of chairs, dessert forks and bottles of wine you have. Then there are those other kinds of surprises, like the old friend who has just become vegan or your nephew who recently developed an allergy to some ingredient that happens to be in every dish you made. There's no way to prepare for that, but there's always something they can eat along with pickles, radishes and raw carrots. Surprisingly, they usually have no problem consuming alcohol, unless they've recently join AA. Then you're really screwed.

We have none of those concerns this year and that's just fine with me. Maybe next year covid will be under control and we can get together with friends and family again.

Fortunately, there will always be skeletons to dress up in funny hats! 

Now it's time to be jolly and maybe pare the decor down to just one holiday.

Thanks for stopping by, see you soon!