One of the best parts of Thanksgiving dinner is the gravy made from the pan drippings. Here are Alton Brown’s directions for making a smooth, not greasy dressing. It’s actually pretty easy. Now the last task is carving the bird, for which you’ll thank yourself for investing in an electric knife. It really makes it …
Tag: Holidays
Nov 25 2021
A Seth Meyer’s Family Thanksgiving (Reprise)
These videos were posted by ek hornbeck in Thanksgiving day in 2018 with the videos that re no longer available edited out. TMC Back In My Day Newlywed Game Embarrassing Your Children (Part 1) Embarrassing Your Children (Part 2)
Nov 24 2021
What’s Cooking: Pan Gravy and Carving the Bird
One of the best parts of Thanksgiving dinner is the gravy made from the pan drippings. Here are Alton Brown’s directions for making a smooth, not greasy dressing. It’s actually pretty easy. Now the last task is carving the bird, for which you’ll thank yourself for investing in an electric knife. It really makes it …
Nov 26 2020
What’s Cooking: Pan Gravy and Carving the Bird
One of the best parts of Thanksgiving dinner is the gravy made from the pan drippings. Here are Alton Brown’s directions for making a smooth, not greasy dressing. It’s actually pretty easy. Now the last task is carving the bird, for which you’ll thank yourself for investing in an electric knife. It really makes it …
Dec 22 2019
The First Night of Hanukkah
The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah begins tonight at sundown on December 22 and end at nightfall on December 30. This year the first night coincides with the first full day of winter. It is a commemoration of he rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt. Traditionally the story …
Nov 19 2017
What’s Cooking: Pan Gravy and Carving the Bird
One of the best parts of Thanksgiving dinner is the gravy made from the pan drippings. Here are Alton Brown’s directions for making a smooth, not greasy dressing. It’s actually pretty easy. Now the last task is carving the bird, for which you’ll thank yourself for investing in an electric knife. It really makes it …
Dec 27 2013
Happy Kwanzaa
Thursday began the start of the seven day festival of Kwanzaa, a celebration of Black family, culture and community, that features traditional food, music, dance, story telling and a lighting of symbolic candles each of the seven days.
The folks at Huffington Post put together a video that explains the festival and it core precepts.
Kwanzaa celebrates what its founder called the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba-the seven principles of African Heritage), which Karenga said “is a communitarian African philosophy,” consisting of what Karenga called “the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world.” These seven principles comprise *Kawaida, a Swahili term for tradition and reason. Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, as follows:
Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Kwanzaa symbols include a decorative mat (Mkeka) on which other symbols are placed, corn (Muhindi) and other crops, a candle holder kinara with seven candles (Mishumaa Saba), a communal cup for pouring libation (Kikimbe cha Umoja), gifts (Zawadi), a poster of the seven principles, and a black, red, and green flag. The symbols were designed to convey the seven principles.[8]
Dec 24 2010
On This Christmas Eve and Tomorrow…………
As this Country Still Refuses to Sacrifice Themselves, in any way, keep in mind the soldiers deployed and their families here!
Dec 22 2010
What’s In The Brown Paper Bag?
(I originally posted this item in December, 2009, at The Dream Antilles. This is a short story by Luis Ramirez, who was executed in Texas on October 20, 2005. My thanks to Abe Bonowitz for passing this story along to me. The story doesn’t require any commentary, and I’m not going to give any. It’s a gift to all of you for the Holidays, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, Solstice, whatever holiday, if any, you may celebrate.)
May 08 2010
Mothers’ Day In Stir
Albion Correctional Facility
Almost three quarters of the 2,422 women in New York state prisons are mothers.
So City Limits reminds us.
Women in New York State are imprisoned primarily at Bedford Hills and Albion.
Maybe we can pause for a second this weekend and think about some of these families– and families in similar circumstances wherever you live– in which the mother is behind bars and the children would like to visit. This is particularly hard in big states, like New York, when the children are in, say, Brooklyn, and the mom is in Albion, some 400 miles away, a distance Google says you can drive in under 7 hours. One way.
Mothers’ Day had some of its origins in the U.S. in the mid-19th century as a day to bring together families that had been on opposite sides of the civil war. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to have focused since then on re-connecting families separated by prison walls.
Maybe this would be a time to begin envisioning precisely that.
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cross-posted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos
Apr 06 2010
Sure I’ll take a side of Socialist Rhethoric with my Holiday Ham
Aren’t Holidays with the Family a hoot —
especially when “Fans of Fox News” see it as an Opportunity,
to test out their latest Socialism Fear tactics?
Parroting Winger Talking Points is one thing —
But claiming every Govt program is actually a dangerous Socialist Plot,
is really verging on the edge of lunacy …
Responding with civility and common sense — in between helpings of three-bean-casserole, and slices of ham —
can be Challenging to say the least …
Jan 16 2010
For Doctor King
The following MLK Weekend Essay is a reprint of an April 4, 2008 essay.
I’m thinking about times more than forty years ago when I sang, “We Shall Overcome.” I’m remembering how I felt when I sang it, holding hands, swaying, anticipation in the air. I loved the idea of walking hand in hand, black and white together, and at the same time there was always a tension, a tightness in my jaw and in the pit of my stomach, the presence of fear. The song’s purpose was to get ready to do what had to be done. I’m committed to nonviolence, I recall thinking, but there are those who are not. They shot James Meredith, and lynched Emmitt Till, and burned Greyhound buses, and unlike me, they don’t want me to be safe. Uncertainty about what will happen tightens my jaw, while my heart commits me to the cause.
Remembering these fears rekindles my old thoughts. I remember the policemen in the church parking lot writing down the license plate numbers as if it were the Appalachin Crime Convention. My mind flashes from people sitting in a restaurant who stop eating to stare and sneer, to the incomprehensible Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to the repeated, threatening phone calls, to kids on a school bus yelling hate names through the windows, to the Klan and the police, and wondering how they were different. I think about the person who ran over my dog.
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