Hi, everyone!
After the town picked up our leaf pile, we had some warm weather for November. Grandma and I took advantage of that to get started putting the holiday lights on the apple trees! I helped Grandma test all the strings to make sure they would light, then we started installing them! The first two trees have been growing well, so they got more lights back and forth through their branches than in other years. Sometimes the lights get caught on little branches when we are threading the entire string around a big branch. I have to help Grandma untangle the snags when that happens! We had to stop after three trees, because there’s a big gap! One of our apple trees didn’t get enough sun and never leafed out this year. Grandpa cut it down. He has a plan for how we can still have apple tree lights where that tree was, but wasn’t quite time to do his plan.
A few days after we put up the apple tree lights, we had another nice, dry day. More of our leaves had come down, so Grandma and Grandpa did another yard cleanup. I got another big leaf pile and made sure to play in it right away! The leaves on the maple trees in the back yard border had all turned yellow, but they were still on the trees! Grandma thinks we can wait for the rest of them to come down before doing another clearing! The gap in the apple trees made it easier to drag all the back yard leaves to the edge of the street in front!
The Sunday before Thanksgiving, James and Thomas and the other children at church made the reverse Advent calendar for this year. This year, people at church will bring their week’s collection to church every Sunday. I wanted to make sure we were all ready for the start of the calendar on December 1, so I asked Grandma if we could go buy everything for the calendar at one time. We did that on Monday, before the Thanksgiving food shopping rush started! Grandma had checked on-line where all the items were shelved in our local store and written the aisle numbers down on our copy of the calendar. I made sure we got everything from one aisle before we moved on to the next! When we got to aisle 8, the pudding snack cup shelves were empty! That’s the item for Christmas Eve, so Grandma says she’ll keep checking for it as she shops during December. I was happy when we checked out all our items and packed them into the car!
On Tuesday, I woke up to snow! We had enough snow overnight to cover the grass! The yellow maple leaves started falling in the back yard. They looked very pretty in the sunshine on the snow!
Uncle Steven and Aunt Kara were hosting Thanksgiving dinner. Grandma said she’d bring an apple pie and cinnamon ice cream. On Tuesday, she made the custard base for the ice cream and let it chill overnight. On Wednesday, I did my usual job of watching the ice cream maker to make sure Grandpa knew when it was churned and ready to go into the freezer.
The weather was warm enough on Wednesday that most of the snow had melted. Grandma wanted to finish putting up the apple tree lights while the weather was good, so Grandpa installed his substitute for the dead apple tree. It’s a clothes tree — the kind that people use to hang laundry on to dry outside. Grandpa put the support for the clothes tree in the ground back when it was soft after all the rain. He took the cover off the support tube and slid the clothes tree in. It opens like an umbrella! Grandma and I strung lights to the clothes tree from the last tree that already had lights and back again, fastening the lights at both ends. Then we added another string of lights around the lines on the clothes tree and on to the final tree. We fastened those, too, so the clothes tree wouldn’t spin around. It looks a little strange in daylight, but we hope at night the lights were look as pretty as every other year. We discovered a big split in the main branch of the last tree! That branch is the only one not shaded by other trees, so it grew out in an unsupported direction. Grandpa lashed the branch together as best he could.
The day after Thanksgiving is the start of a weekend of special store and website sales for Christmas. Grandpa took advantage of one sale to buy a whole, boneless pork loin. That’s enough for a lot of meals! On Saturday, I helped Grandma cut it up into packages for two or three meals. After we put those in the freezer, Grandpa went out to put up the snow gauge for the winter.
When Grandma makes cinnamon ice cream, she uses egg yolks and has egg whites left over. She doesn’t like to throw out any food, so she found a recipe for gooey chocolate cookies that uses up the egg whites. She made that recipe on Sunday. Yesterday, she made another cookie recipe to use up the ricotta cheese she bought to make sweet potato gnocchi a while ago. I helped make the dough and chill the dough. Rolling the dough into balls to bake would have made my paws too sticky, so Grandma did that. We didn’t bake up all the dough, but it keeps for a week in the refrigerator. Both kinds of cookies were yummy!
Today is the first day of December! My Christmas cactus didn’t quite bloom for Thanksgiving, but has lots of buds and several blossoms now. The first item for my reverse Advent calendar is a box of cookies! I hope whoever gets them from the food shelf likes the flavor I picked!
Love,
Lion-san
I was sorry to hear about the loss of one of the apple trees. It was very creative of Grandpa to put up the clothes tree to fill in the gap. I hope the other tree with the split branch is okay!