Book of Days

This chapter of the Book of Days Blog comes to you from Table #12 at the Farmer Girl Restaurant on North Dixie Highway in Lake Worth, where I almost always see someone I know (this morning it’s Frank: Howdy Frank!) and where each Thanksgiving, Pete Roubekas, the owner, serves up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and all the trimmings, on the house, for anyone who has no place to go… be it no family to cook for or no invitation to accept or decline or even no home to call their own. Pete’s been doing this for 30 years now, but that’s Pete, and that’s the spirit of this town. Sure, there are plenty of not-so-great folks here (don’t fall for the story of the woman who says her scooter’s broken down and needs to borrow 20 bucks––her scooter’s been broken down for as long as Pete’s been serving free Thanksgiving dinners), but people like Pete make Lake Worth what it is: a solid community, filled with people who are willing to take care of you, even when you don’t necessarily feel you deserve it. We are content, and we are thankful. The two go hand in hand.

I love that Pete does this. Another thing I like about Pete is the fact that his place is decorated today with pumpkins and dried corn. It’s clear the man is ready for Thanksgiving. And there is not a hint of yuletide cheer to be found. Which, we heartily believe, is how it should be.

If you know us well, you know Seth and I refer to this as the Slow Christmas Movement. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who loves Christmas as much as we do, but we don’t like seeing Christmas throwing its weight around and bullying lesser holidays. Especially Thanksgiving, which, each year, seems to get swallowed up by Christmas more and more so that it seems like one long holiday from our day of thanks all the way through the 25th of December.

Each year, we issue an invitation: Join us in the Slow Christmas Movement. Take your time. Enjoy Thanksgiving and all its autumnal bounty. What comes next––and this year it begins on the Sunday after Thanksgiving––is Advent, a time of preparation for Christmas. The nights grow increasingly darker and we acknowledge this by illuminating more and more candles on the Advent wreath as we approach Christmas. And each night we light our daily Advent candle during dinner. We watch it get smaller and smaller as Christmas approaches. And then, before bed each night, we open another window of the Advent calendar to see what surprise awaits us there. Here’s a secret: We like to hold the open calendar window up to a light source from behind, so the picture in the window glows.

If these seem like simple celebrations, they are. And that’s the point. Christmas is a big deal. It comes in with a bang and it actually lasts for another twelve days after Christmas Day. Those are the Twelve Days of Christmas we sing about in the famous carol, running all the way up to the 6th of January. So why rush now? There’s plenty of time to enjoy Christmas once it comes, but for now, enjoy Thanksgiving. Be like Pete. Be thankful and give each day its time and space.

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At our website, www.conviviobookworks.com, you’ll find all kinds of traditional German Advent calendars (the ones with lots of glitter you remember from your childhood) as well as British ones, and some very lovely Advent candles, two of which are handmade in England.

Image: One extremely beautiful Rouge vif D’Etampes pumpkin, given to me by a very kind person who knows how much I love heritage pumpkins. The world is full of kind people.