Image taken by Ernest Brooks during the Battle of Broodseinde, showing a group of soldiers of the 8th East Yorkshire Regiment moving up to the front, silhouetted against the skyline.
Category Archives: Holidays
National Museum of Mexican Art ’15
Five years ago this month, I made it to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, in time to see its annual Día de los Muertos exhibit. This year it was cancelled as an in-person event, as you’d think. No visiting the Day of the Dead exhibit in person, to reduce the chance of Death coming your way.
I haven’t visited since, though there’s still time to see this year’s exhibit virtually, which is probably interesting, but not as satisfying as being there. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that primary experience is primary.
At the National Museum of Mexican Art, I experienced art skulls.
Two Puebla artists, Jose Antonio Cazabal Castro and Silverio Feliciano Reyes Sarmiento, created this monumental altar for Day of the Dead celebrations in the town of Huaquechula in the state of Puebla. Remembering a boy, looks like.
One more.
A detail, most of it really, of “Skeletons of Quinn/Calacas de Quinn,” a 2015 work by Hugo Crosthwaite of Baja California.
Canada Day 2020 &c
Back on July 6. Canada Day is here, after all, and Independence Day isn’t long from now (and also the 40th anniversary of the wide release of Airplane!). In honor of both holidays, I created a temporary display on my deck.
That calls for a U.S.-Canada holiday week: North America Independence Week. Better yet, we kick off the celebration with Juneteenth and end it with Nunavut Day (July 9) — a mid-summer mashup of independence and freedom celebrations.
Not much work gets done from ca. December 21 to January 3. No reason we can’t do the same at the polar opposite point in the calendar.
Early in the evening on the last day of June, we took a walk around Spring Creek Reservoir Forest Preserve in Bloomingdale, a small part (90 acres) of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. Access is from E. Lake St., which is a stretch of U.S. 20, which goes all the way from Massachusetts to Oregon or vice versa.
It’s a simple circle around the reservoir. The FP District says: “In presettlement times, the forest preserve was almost entirely woodland with a small slough. It was a gravel pit from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, when it became a reservoir. The Forest Preserve District acquired the reservoir in 1987 and additional parcels in 1999 and 2000.”
Not just a reservoir, but a place for runoff from Spring Creek — flood control for Bloomingdale, as evidenced by a small dam with a spillway at the north end of the reservoir. Further downstream, Spring Creek is called Spring Brook (according to Google Maps, anyway), which eventually merges with Salt Creek, a tributary of the Des Plaines River.
Lush summer vegetation all along the way.
Spotted a monarch in the weeds.
According to the info board, the path measures a shade more than a mile around. My gizmo, which measures steps, agrees.
A Summer Thursday
Tomorrow is Juneteenth, which I’ve thought should be a holiday for years. I still do. Odds are it might be in some soon year.
Summer pic: a trumpeter swan family, who can be found at a pond near where I live.
Dame Vera Lynn has died at 103. I didn’t know she was still alive. I might not have known about her before I first saw this, many years ago, but I certainly did afterward.
Wednesday Water & Fire
Back to posting again on Tuesday. It’s an early Memorial Day this year, five days removed from Decoration Day, and in fact May 25 is as early as it can be under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Next year the holiday swings to the latest possible position, May 31, and then in 2022, it’s square on Decoration Day.
Warmish day today, this Wednesday, a relief from a too cool Tuesday. Pleasant enough to have lunch on the deck. The grass is still squishy underfoot.
Many places in this part of the country have had a lot of rain. Too much in some places. I read today that downtown Midland, Mich., flooded because the rain-swollen Tittabawassee breached a dam not far away. Of course, rain was only the immediate cause. Looks like a whole lot of negligence on someone’s part. Boatloads of litigation, dead ahead.
The story caught my attention mainly because we visited Midland only last year, on September 1, taking a stroll in places that are now underwater.
This evening I went outside to take a few things to the garage. Returning, I noticed a bright object in the sky off to the northwest. It looked like a fire balloon. A single one, drifting along. I was astonished. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever seen pictures of them before, not the thing itself.
Who launched it? Why? Who thought that was a good idea in a suburban area, with rooftops to catch fire? The risk is probably fairly small, but still — that’s not something I want landing near me. On the other hand, the balloon made a pretty sight as it wandered along. I watched it as it went from being a small flickering light to a very small flickering light in the sky, finally disappearing in the distance.
Kashiwa Mochi
We don’t always acknowledge Japanese holidays, but sometimes we do. This year for Children’s Day, formerly known as Boys’ Day, we ate kashiwa mochi, which is a thing to do on Children’s Day. The holiday is better known in this country for its carp streamers, but we don’t happen to have any of those. (Oddly enough, my mother had three that used to hang in the garage. I don’t know what became of them.)
Kashiwa mochi are rice cakes filled with red bean jam and wrapped in oak leaves. The ones we ate came in the package to the right. The small kanji characters say Sakuraya, the brand name, while the larger hiragana characters say kashiwa mochi.
You’d think it’s a product of Japan, but no. It’s domestic, possibly made by a bakery called Sakuraya in Gardena, Calif., and distributed by the Japanese Confection Inc. of College Point, NY. The package, and the Internet, isn’t clear on those points.
The red bean jam is mildly sweet, as red bean jam usually is, but the mochi rice cakes weren’t as sticky as I’m used to eating around the New Year.
Though not that sweet, curiously enough the first ingredient listed for the confection is sugar, followed by rice flour, red bean, sweet rice flour and potato starch.
As befitting its sugar content, it’s almost all carbohydrate, with no fat of any kind and only a touch of protein. No sodium, either.
Toward the end of ingredient list is “salted kashiwa leaf,” that is, the oak leaf. Not edible, but nice to look at. It also wraps the mochi, giving you something to hold it with.
Presidents Day?
This came to my attention ahead of “Presidents Day.” It exists in the realm of not just the ignorant, but the proudly ignorant. Not recognizing Warren G. Harding is a fairly minor bit of ignorance, but the subtext is that everyone is, and should be ignorant, of the past.
Arguably today isn’t even really Presidents Day, not if you cite the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which calls it Washington’s Birthday. Presidents Day seems to be an invention of calendar makers and ad men, who can’t even agree on whether there should be an apostrophe or where it should be (AP says no apostrophe).
So no Presidents Day unless, however, your state uses the term “Presidents Day,” or some variation. There is no agreement among the several states. Or unless you feel like calling it that. At this point, it’s a touch pedantic to deny the name at all.
“…we now have a hodgepodge of state holiday schedules in the USA: some states still observe Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays as separate holidays, some states observe only Washington’s Birthday, some states commemorate both with a single Presidents’ Day (or Lincoln-Washington Day), and some states celebrate neither,” Snopes says.
“And there are odd exceptions such as Alabama, which designated the third Monday in February as a day commemorating both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (even though Jefferson was born in April).”
This state of affairs might rankle those who are fond of dull uniformity, but the more I think about it, the better I like it. Each state honors Washington in its own way, just as the proliferation of Columbus Day alternatives and dope law is according to the states. Keeps things interesting.
You could also argue that today isn’t Washington’s Birthday either, depending on how you feel about the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, though I can appreciate the urge to create three-day weekends. The Father of Our Country was born on February 22 N.S. or February 11 O.S., to complicate things just a little more. Try explaining that to someone who doesn’t know Harding’s face, even with those distinctive eyebrows.
I Hope the Danes Appreciated the Show
A lot of musicians have recorded “Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” such as the Weavers, where I first probably heard it, or Odetta, just to name two.
But for joy and sheer verve, I haven’t heard a rendition to match this one.
Johnny Cash, members of the Carter family, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers and the Tennessee Three, in 1971 in Denmark and in their prime. Solid camera work, too. Somehow or other I never saw this wonderful clip until the other day.
Christmas Cake
Christmas cake isn’t much of a holiday custom in the U.S., though it is more so in Japan, in as much as Christmas gets attention there beyond a modest amount of decoration and KFC. Actually, I don’t remember any to-do about KFC on Christmas in the early ’90s in Japan. Maybe it’s really a Tokyo thing — that’s often enough mistaken for the entirely of Japan by gaijin observers. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention.
I digress. Yuriko made a Christmas cake this year.
Much chocolate, a healthy serving of cherries, and, you’ll see, a few dashes of edible gold. It’s so good it’ll hardly last until Christmas.
Christmases Past (No Need for a Ghost to Show Me)
I opened up one of our boxes of physical photo prints the other day, when I moved it from the space that the Christmas tree, bought on Saturday, now occupies. The photos are only partly organized, but even so I found some holiday images from the days before digital photography.
December 1997
The first time we took Lilly out, who appears here in one of those baby-hauling slings. We went to Lincoln Park on an unusually warm December day, including a visit to the conservatory, which had a display of poinsettias.
December 2000
One of the Christmases in the western suburbs.
December 2003
First Christmas in the northwestern suburbs, and first one for Ann.
December 2006
Ann and Lilly with a Santa Claus — maybe the one who used to appear at the office of the Realtor who sold us our house. That’s pretty much a Realtor sort of thing to do for the holidays. By this time, Ann was learning about the jolly old elf; and Lilly had given up on literal Santa, but was game enough to visit with her sister.