A festive weekend

It was a weekend of feasting beginning with Halloween.  The kids didn't haul in the amount of candy they have gathered in the past, but all of it was good candy. No Laffy Taffy or Sugar Daddies.

The kids begged me for days to carve pumpkins, which we got for free at a party on the base. No trips to the pumpkin patch for photo shoots or even picking a goodly shaped squash from the supermarket bin. I kept finding excuses. So finally on Halloween afternoon I handed them the knives and said, "Go carve your pumpkins."  No one needed stitches, and the final result was successful. Just forgot to get candles.

A mad scientist

The scary candy hander outer.
 He wore the pi symbol on his orange shirt to school - pumpkin pi, get it?

For one event, he was a pirate, the next a Navy guy,
the third he was a zombie referee.

 The kids also put their own costumes together from the dress up collection, and were able to find multiple outfits for the base party, the school parade, and actual trick-or-treating. I just had no desire to be crafty or creative this year. And I felt a vague sense of foreboding that I have another 10-12 years of this with the new baby.  I didn't even do much to help the second grader with her Saint Clare costume for All Saints' Day. I didn't even think about it until two days before. I feel a little guilty that I didn't at least make a brown cassock for her instead of having her wear the black priest cassock I made years ago. Ah well, I'm not sure very many people realized she wasn't in Franciscan colors.

The blond tresses really need to be shaved.
 Francis would not approve.

Here is a saint in the making:

Not a Halloween alien - it's Baby! I love these 3D ultrasounds.
Trying to fatten those arms by eating lots of chocolate.

That's a girl in the ultrasound, photo taken on Halloween, according to the technician. Let the name game begin! Something from Friday's litany of saints? Perpetua or Felicity? Agnes? One of my boys is Benedict, so he suggested Scholastica.

The middle name is already decided: Jane, which is the middle name of myself, my mom, and my great- grandmother, while both of my grandmothers shared the middle name Jean. I've felt guilty about not using it earlier. Scholastica Jane has a ring to it - would it guarantee good grades?

These people are much more crafty than me. They handed out popcorn, cider, and hot dogs.

For All Souls Day, my sister-in-law invited us over for what I hope will be a yearly tradition.  In honor of our deceased grandparents, we made food that we remember them by. The hardest part was deciding what to make: dried pork chops and canned green beans? Shrimp mold? Both grandmothers made Jello "salads." But since this meal was at brunch time, for one grandmother, I made sour cream coffee cake, and for the other I made pink stuff, a Jello and Cool Whip concoction. I should have made 7 Layer Salad, but the kids wanted the Jello dessert. Then I made cottage cheese and canned peaches for one grandfather and angel food cake for the other. That grandfather traditionally made ice cream for everyone's birthday, but I remember him liking angel food cake for his own. This may be a fictitious memory because I liked angel food cake, and his birthday was a couple weeks after mine.  For my husband's side, we made bacon balls, meat loaf, and a lemon pudding meringue that turned out clumpy because my son who mixed it up misread the pudding recipe. His brother provided macaroni salad, chocolate milk and donuts, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and his wife made a peach pizza and German potato salad. She had a little altar set up with marigolds and photos, and a chocolate offering. I also made pan de muerte just because I like it, in honor of all our other deceased relatives and friends. Quite a menu.

We indulged and reminisced and enjoyed the November sunshine.

Day of the Dead

In honor of All Soul's Day: photos of the souls in my prayers, my beloved grandparents. I realize that All Soul’s Day is a day for praying for the souls in purgatory, but I’d like to believe that my grandparents shortened their time there with all the love they gave us. I couldn’t imagine any better grandparents.  They were all involved in their grandchildren's lives. They were generous to us and interested in us, and their homes were like sanctuaries, especially in our turbulent teen years, when we viewed our parents as our adversaries.  

All Soul's Day is a day of celebration here in Guam. A newly arrived neighbor commented with incredulity about the man buying $250 of ugly silk flowers at the Exchange. The cemeteries are all cleaned up and decorated with these silk arrangements, which really aren’t especially lovely, except that they represent the fact that someone took the time to go to a gravesite and say a few prayers. We went to Mass in the chapel, not in the cemetery on base, where the chaplain said Mass in the morning. It is a small town graveyard that got incorporated into military property after WWII, but the base is open to descendents of the people buried there on this day, and our priest mentioned how these descendents bring their folding chairs and sit next to their mom or dad or auntie during the liturgy.  Some of them will go on over to another cemetery for another Mass with another family member.  Not surprisingly, this is a tradition that may die out; few of the people out decorating graves when I drove by one of the larger cemeteries looked younger than 50.  But I hope it survives. There is something comforting in the thought of spending a little time with the bodies of our dearly departed.  I have to credit my grandparents for taking us to cemeteries on Memorial Day to decorate with peonies the graves of my great-grandparents, at least the ones who died in town. 

I scanned some of these photos last spring after my grandmother’s funeral. I love the peek into my grandparents' lives as young people, full of vim and vigor, which is how my grandmother described her own grandmother. I miss knowing them as they were then. I wish my children could have known them as I knew them. And I hope that my children view their grandparents with the same unconditional, overflowing love I felt for these four people.