Thanksgiving muse

Deb and I navigated east for the holiday weekend to join with millions of others spending time visiting extended family who have wandered far away. (In our case extended family are where they have always been, it is Deb and I who have wandered.) Our family gathering echos that of most I guess, sometimes loud, often boisterous, rooms packed with family who, while not strangers, are not very well known either, with lots of laughter and a grimace or two thrown in for good measure. Of all of our holidays Thanksgiving is the one that reflects human kind's family / tribal roots most dramatically.

As usual there were questions about our cruising plans and the work going on with the boat. Not very detailed questions since boats in our family history are usually simple platforms from which one hunts fish. Spending a night aboard one would mean someone didn't plan very well. It isn't likely many of our clan will be joining us for a visit on Kintala once we get to big, salt water.

Which is where we hope to be one of these Thanksgiving days. My guess is the first one will feel a bit strange with those family / tribal roots noticeably missing.

This Thanksgiving kind of ran right into Christmas, though the latter is still 30 days away. I have to admit to loosing my appetite for Christmas many years ago ... looking at it as nothing more than a shallow celebration of some of the worst traits of our society. (Those being a really childish greed, paying interest on money used to buy things no one needs or even really wants, accumulating waste, and worshiping the idea that a pile of things equals being happy.) Seeing Christmas consumer insanity oozing onto Thanksgiving day just doesn't seem like a positive sign that we are learning anything. But then I'm pretty sure the people who run Madison Ave and Wall Street don't care too much about what one wanna-be sailboat cruiser / off-the-grid wanderer thinks of their efforts. Given that millions of my fellow Americans joined the national mall skirmish of shoving through doors and fighting over bargains, it is clear they don't care much about what I think either.

Which is okay. I feel much the same way about what they think.

So this Thanksgiving I'm pretty happy to be with family. Having a boat at a marina like Boulder is a thing so good that its hard not to feel a little smug. But working toward living in a way that fits so well with my view of the world; to not seeing TV commercials, hearing about Black Friday, or having wads of coupons stuffing my mailbox and cluttering my porch?

Priceless.