My favorite (unusual) Thanksgiving tradition

One of the options for the EtsyBloggers blog carnival this time around was to describe your favorite Thanksgiving tradition. I must admit, I usually don't think about Thanksgiving much any more because it tends to make me a bit sad; my mom always organized these incredible turkey-day dinners for anyone and everyone who wanted to join and she passed away 4 years ago, so Thanksgiving has never been quite the same.

Still, sometimes it's good to squeeze through that initial sadness to remember something good.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with giant dining room (we could seat 25-30 people in there--no, I'm not rich, my parents just happened to buy a run down country "estate" for a song and fix it up before I was born). My mom was a very inclusive person--she definitely lived by "the more the merrier" cliche--and this willingness to have anyone and everyone sometimes translated to some pretty odd collections for Thanksgiving dinner.

See, my dad had been married twice before he married my mom, and had kids from both those previous marriages. My mom not only invited her step-children, but their mothers and even their mothers' other children (the ones not from my dad) and parents to join us. She'd also invite and neighbors and family friends who didn't have a big gathering of their own to go to.

It's funny how what you grow up with just seems normal until you get enough exposure to other people's families--I think I didn't realize just how unusual it was for my mom to invite her husband's ex-wives and the family of those ex-wives until I was 12 or 13. Still, even after I'd realized it was a bit "weird", it never stopped seeming anything other than perfectly suited to the spirit of the holiday itself, no matter how un-traditional a tradition it was. My mom was never terribly big on very "traditional" traditions anyway--that's her pretending to pour the pot of stuffing on my half-sister's head in the picture above.

In "Summery": Etsy Bloggers Blog Carnival

I'm a brand spanking new member of the Etsy Bloggers street team, and one of the cool activities involved is participating in bi-monthly blog carnivals. The latest choice of topics included "In summery", an excuse to blog about what you did this summer. Since I'm both a smart-aleck and a word-nerd I couldn't resist the punny title, so that's the topic I chose.

This summer actually marked the kick-off of my PurrPrints etsy shop (opened May 20th; "Indoor Cat Dreams," shown here, was one of the first listings to go up in my shop). It took all of three days before my husband began joking about my new addiction--I was constantly on the etsy forums, revising my shop, putting up new listings, or drawing new cats. I'd been selling my designs on cafepress and on zazzle for about a year before discovering etsy, but somehow those never proved as addictive as etsy (though I still keep them running because I can't hand-make some of the items I'm able to sell there).

So the summary of my summer-y months can be summed up in that one word: etsy. Sure, I also taught a professional writing class at my local university (my persona when teaching, as you might imagine, is quite different than the one I maintain online--tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandizement doesn't work as well for a room full of would-be professionals) and finished up my PhD coursework by taking a class on Linguistic Theory, but really all I remember is etsy (of course, when it's a toss up between reading de Saussure or etsy forums, the choice isn't exactly a tough one--unless you have a paper due the next day, that is).

But look at me blathering on; aren't summaries supposed to be short? And I'm a writing instructor, too--what a truly scary thought.