Holidays. Thanksgiving week is the start of the Holiday Season. I love this time of year. I am starting to decorate the outside of the condo with the lights that will show our festive spirit from Thanksgiving through the New Year. We are one year removed from Hurricane Ian so we should see more of a festive atmosphere than we had last year. Southwest Florida has a long way to go in our recovery but we no longer have all the piles of debris all over the place and we no longer see those huge black trucks they used to pick up all of the debris. The huge mountains of debris at the collection areas are mostly gone which is a good thing but people do ask where does it all go? Sanibel will not be having their Luminary Festival again this year but maybe next year. I am pretty sure that Tween Waters up on Captiva will be all decorated so I will be taking a drive up there to see it. The Edison Center in Ft. Myers is always decorated really nice at this time of year and I am confident this year will be no exception.  It is well worth the price of admission to just walk around the grounds.

This time of year you also get nostalgic for the Holidays of our youth, for family that is no longer with us. At the age of 70 the number of people that are gone keeps growing. Both my parents have been gone for some years and so have my wife’s. You may find it surprising but one of the people that I think about this time of year the most is my wife’s mother, my mother in-law. I describe her as one of the most blunt women that I have ever met. Her bluntness sometimes could be embarrassing but if you really got to know her she had one of the kindest souls I have ever met. Between her and her brother, my wife’s physician uncle were two of the finest people that I have ever met. I will never be able to live up to the examples they showed me not just through the holidays but how they lived their lives every day. There was a homeless man in the neighborhood that lived in his car. Honey (her nickname) would hire the man to do painting for her and even let the man sleep a couple times in her basement a few times because of the weather. She was very much the Christian that didn’t just talk the talk. She was a Christian that would walk the walk.  When I got married to my wife Thanksgiving weekend 36 years ago I had two children from a previous marriage. My mother in-law, Honey, always treated them just like they were her own grandchildren. When my youngest boy was have some problems in school we decided to record all his textbooks so he could listen and be better prepared for the classroom. Honey did a lot of the recording. At Honey’s funeral my son said that he could still hear Honey’s voice in his head. He now lives in the house that was hers because of his memories and relationship with that wonderful woman. If there is a Heaven I am pretty sure that she is up there being just as blunt with the angels as she always was in life but also being just as loved.

I few years back the wife and I were walking into the Sunflower Café on San Carlos in Ft. Myers Beach on a cool Thanksgiving Florida morning. There was a homeless man that you could tell was very cold. I always wear just a long sleeve blue jean shirt as a jacket. I took it off and walk across the parking lot where he was standing and gave him the shirt and said Happy Thanksgiving. He didn’t say a word but as I was walking away I could see him putting it on. You don’t do acts of kindness for the thank you; you do them because it is the right thing to do. I think that Honey would have been proud. That is why I am going to propose that all the political insults should be put on pause between now and the New Year. Let’s talk about solutions instead of the problems. Do you think that could be a possibility? I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that Trump couldn’t manage that for 5 minutes let alone the next month and ten days.  In fact I will be willing to bet that his Thanksgiving message to the nation will be laced with political insults. It is the insults that will ruin the Holidays for many. There is that old joke that if you want a quiet Christmas just talk politics at Thanksgiving. There will be no such talk at our Thanksgiving table.

I know that the Thanksgiving story that we learned as Children is basically an embellishment (that is a nice way do saying that they were not really true) of the real events but that has never diminished the day for me or the Holiday Season. Giving thanks and sharing of our table with friends and family is something that we shouldn’t need a day for but because we do we should make the most of it. I will be watching the big parade in the morning. My Green bay Packers will be playing Detroit and I will have two large screen televisions that will be on for the game. The whole place will have the smell of the Turkey that will be baking in the oven. It will be a feast that will make everyone happy. We will even have some Lefse so I can remember my Scandinavian ancestry. Of course there will be pumpkin pie. We will have nine friends over though to be honest with you we would welcome more if they needed a place to go. Our dog will be confused who she should beg food from, she is the best dog I have had but she does love her food. That is what the day should be, surround by old friend and new friends and a very confused dog. Last year we had our friends for Kentucky at our table and they will be missed. It will always be a day to remember the people that are missing from the table too. I am not a person that prays but it being my home I will give a few words on how I am lucky to have these friends around me not only for the Thanksgiving but that fact that they are in my life year round.

I am going to try and not insult the Politian’s during the Holiday Season that I feel are trying to end our republic as we know it. I won’t stop writing the truth as I see it but I will try to be pointing many of the good things that are happening the country but I will not ignore the bad. You can’t ignore the bad. The Holiday Season for me has always been a chance for everyone to try and reinvent themselves into the people that make the world a better place because we are in it. Just like the seasons starting over again so do we have the chance to start over again too. This Holiday Season I will try to add one thing that makes me proud that I am an American.  This will not be the most read posting that I will have but maybe it should be. Let’s start the Holidays right.