Oh, put a stake in me!  I just can’t take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.  You won.  Alright?  You came in and you killed them and you took their land.  That’s what conquering nations do.  It’s what Julius Caesar did.  He’s not going around saying, “I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it.”  The history of the world is not people making friends.  You had better weapons and you massacred them.  End of story.

~Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4, “Pangs”~

I adore Thanksgiving.  It is possibly my favorite annual celebration.  In the nine Thanksgivings since I left college, I have been known to put on some serious feasts.  The compulsive planner in me thrives on reviewing recipes, writing up a menu, gathering ingredients from at least four different grocerey stores,  and preparing each dish with love.  And like the Buffster, the sentimental mystic, in me is attracted to the ritual and tradition of the day and the spiritual nature of collecting loved ones around the table.  But the budding history buff in me (cultivates by Athena, actually) struggles with the background for this cultural melee and has to acknowledge that Spike has a valid point. 

So what’s a girl to do?  Especially a girl who espouses the goal of homeschooling socially conscious children with an accurate understanding of the true events of human history with all its inherrant beauty and malice, amazing acts of love and mind boggling atrocities alike.  The best I’ve been able to come up with is to focus on the “Thanks” part of Thanksgiving for now.  To teach our children that, in this day and age, it is our country’s cultural tradition to take a day to focus on our blessings, to cultivate a spirit of gratitude.  We’re going to skip stereotypical dancing pilgrims and singing natives.  Two years from now, when we reach that period of history in our curriculum, we’ll get to the settlement of North America by the European colonists and tackle the history behind Turkey Day. 

Modern Americans cannot make up for all of our early historical mistakes.  And this modern American is not going to waste time trying.  I’ll spend tomorrow revelling in the modern customs and rituals that are meant to invoke that spirit of gratitude within me and my offspring.  I will give thanks for my family and my life with reckless abandon.  And I will continue to strive to raise children who, with any luck, will turn out to be the type of Americans who can successfully lead this nation through their contemporary history-making events, learning from previous generations’ mistakes and moving forward into a brillant future. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

What were the top two reasons you voted for your choice for President?  I’m sure if you asked this question of a wide swath of people you would get an amazing variety of answers.  Some would make a great deal of logical sense, even if you didn’t agree with their position.  Others would contain little to no logic at all, motivated by countless other factors.  Whatever rational you used to cast your vote is yours and you exercised that privilage and responsibility.  You, as an American citizen, are entitled to your reasons.  But your reasons are not inherrently better or worse than anyone else’s reasons, they are simply your own.  Election Day was yesterday.  And now our country has a new President-Elect.  This man and this nation face some serious issues, ones that will affect our lives for many years to come.  Now it is time to begin moving towards solutions.  If you do not agree with the solutions presented, then by all means take advantage of the freedoms accorded you in this country and work to make your voice heard, including offering alternative possibilities.  But please consider for a minute, the possibility of opening your heart to really listen as different ideas are presented, because even if , like Denny Crane, you truly believe it’s all about salmon and women, standing still and remaining mired in the reality of today, is just not an option.

Yesterday seems to have opened some sort of literary flood gate for me.  I made 3,002 words before calling it quits for the night and have barely been able to function the rest of the day today because I keep wanting to write things.  Not just my NaNoWriMo project, but other things too.  I wrote the first poem I’ve written in a long while.  I journalled in both my regular daily journal and the one I set aside specifically for matters of spiritual exploration.  I started the next volume of the elementary level art history textbook I need to have done by January.  I finished an article on alternative education options for a natural parenting website.  I’m writing this blog post.  Heck, I even wrote a letter to my Godmother I’ve been meaning to get done for weeks now.  I don’t know where this is all coming from or how long it is going to last, but I am baffled at my sudden productivity.  Hopefully, the kids wont mind subsisting on peanut butter and jelly until Mommy’s temporary insanity passes. 

My mind has also raced through the day from one subject to another, begging to release it all somehow.  That’s surely been a contributing factor.  The tension in the country is palpable as the energy builds towards Tuesday and beyond.  Anyone who wanted to can probably sense it.  In a month where the natural world around us begins to slow down, turn inward and halt its growth, I find it terribly ironic that we are so out of sync with the season.  As the holiday chaos kicks off, we find ourselves accelerating our lives, piling more and more on our already packed plates.  Traditional images of autumn flicker through my mind.  The trees strip themselves bare and simplify their basic needs this time of year, while we deck our halls with layer upon layer of ornate junk and write out 74 item to do lists every Saturday.  I actually sympathize with the traditional Christian community during these months.  Their theology is generally made a mockery of and abused for greedy capitalistic purposes left and right and that’s got to be frustrating.  But there is hope, I think.  We do find that moment of clarity as the actual cultural holiday arrives and the unfinished items on the to do list suddenly aren’t nearly as urgent as we thought they were.  We settle in.  We trade party dresses and bow ties for pajamas and slippers.  We trade outside obligations for precious moments with family and friends.  We eventually strip down and simplify and focus.  If only we could get there without the lengthy, odd, stressful and, in the end, wholly unnecessary preliminary craziness.  On the phone this evening, my parents suggested they join us for the holidays this year.  Maybe if they do, we can all strive together to skip the annual rite of passage that is holiday stress and just enjoy each other and the Triad of Chaos in joy and peace.  Or maybe I’ll just be too busy NaNoWriMoing to care about the approaching holiday season and poof, suddenly it will be upon me with no time left to do much but enjoy it.  Except I’m not sure “Nope, honey.  No turkey, just PBJ.  I’ve been busy novelling.” would go over too well with Patris Maximus.

At times I am certain I am living life at near terminal velocity.  It is practically a compulsion.  I am also almost certain I am pretty incapable of slowing down much at all.  I find the need to be working on about ten to the google power at the same time.  Books, I’m reading, various writing projects, something in a half finished state hanging out on almost every set of knitting needles I own, homeschooling the kiddos, baking muffins, bread or both, watching my latest television obssession (currently My Own Worst Enemy– Christian Slater is soooo back!) planning the latest class or activity I’m facilitating, listening to a variety of weirdo podcasts, and the list goes on and on.  So, really, in theory, adding something to my plate is probably insane.  But I have never been the picture of perfect mental health.  Enter NaNoWriMo. 

If you aren’t familiar with this particular brand of insanity, the basic premise is that hundreds of questionably insane folks around the world join together and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. From the first to the thirtieth of November, they all typety-type-type like mad, squashing any self-doubt or self-criticism with the simple goal of just getting it all down on paper sans editing. It is pretty crazy. I’ve considered doing this in the past, but have always been a little intimidated by novel writing. Almost all other forms of writing (except any form of playwriting) delight me and I love indulging in them. Hence this blog, as a small example. But novel writing, with all its dialog and need for a coherent plot that could carry the length of the piece, always freaks me out. The level of commitment to a work that long is breath-taking. NaNoWriMo, however, strives to make many of the intimidating factors of novel writing irrelevant. Who cares? is the mantra of the month. Who cares if your plot totally falls apart and changes directions a quarter of the way into the story? Who cares if your main character’s name isn’t the same all of a sudden? Who cares if your novel is a total piece of hyena dung? It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you keep writing until the very end.

So this year, I registered at the site. I was really, until this morning, still unsure that I’d even get started. I dug out my old hunk-of-junk-barely-a-decent-word-processor-now laptop and a notebook with a few ideas scribbled down in it this morning. It sat on the living room floor while the kids played. I vacuumed around it, sorted laundry next to it, and during naptime finally booted it up. Day One of NaNoWriMo. I am happy to say that I have a plot. And a name for my main characters. And a little structure. And, most important of all– 876 words, so far. That’s about half of what I need to get down today to be on pace, so hopefully I can get the Triad of Chaos settled in a speedy fashion and knock out the rest of the daily quota. Who knows? Twenty-nine days from now, I could be a novelist. That is insanity.