Here I sit, at the kitchen table of the big, ramshackle house at Lutheridge, the church camp where my family has always had our holiday festivities (well, since 1992 or so), the house where we’ve assembled for at least 20 years. It was at this table, on the Saturday of Thanksgiving week-end in 2022, where I first assembled the log cabin patch out of scraps, and I’ve been doing it ever since, and may just continue to do it until my fingers won’t let me.
It has been
a great Thanksgiving this year, although zooming by too fast, and I know I
likely say that every year. This year,
all the members of the next generation are teenagers now, which brings a certain
sadness about all the books we’re not reading about giving a mouse a cookie or
llamas in pajamas.
The project
became a bit bigger than we first thought it would be. She chose small squares, and we made them
into larger squares of four patches; then we made took the template she’d made of
paper letters and cut out the fabric. We
used the Steam-a-seam product to make sure the letters didn’t move around.
And what do you know—it worked! It looked very much like the picture that had provided the inspiration, and she was very happy with it. The whole family had a great spirit going in, and they assured my spouse and me (mostly me) that whatever happened would be fine. I was worried about a ruined sweatshirt and the crushing of creative dreams—I’m so happy that didn’t happen. The oldest teenager was so happy with her creation that she wore it on the long car trip home. I wish we had had more time to sew the letters to the sweatshirt, but she knows how to do it, and her mom knows some folks who will help, and in the meantime, they won’t wash the sweatshirt.
In a way, that’s a metaphor for the whole holiday time together—the worry that the experience won’t live up to expectations, the happiness of time together, the realization that it’s all going to be O.K., even if not exactly perfect.
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