Papa Noel with Papa Frank

To view the pictures larger, just click on them.





Another South Louisiana tradition is the bonfires that are set up along the Mississippi River.  These fires are lit on Christmas Eve to guide Papa Noel into Cajun children's homes.











The Rural Life Museum is on part of the old Burden Plantation.  Click on the words to see their website.  The land is a working agricultural research station.  For example, the pointsettias you buy every year are researched, varieties tested and chosen for the next year's production.

Steel Burden,    whose family owned the land, worked as a landscape architect in Baton Rouge.  He created the city park system plantings, and was involved in the plantings at McIllhenny Plantation, which is the hot pepper sauce people.

If you come to Baton Rouge we can go tour the Hot Sauce factory in New Iberia and then check out the Windrush Gardens and Rural Life Museum in Baton Rouge.  

The Rural Life Museum here in Baton Rouge has Heritage Christmas Day ever December.  The museum consists of multiple buildings from homesteads, plantations and farms in the area that were part of the daily life .  They have a large museum of items from the period both agricultural implements and household items.

At the Heritage Days there are artisans doing things like chopping wood and quill pen writing.  Making candles and shoeing horses and mules.  Making cane syrup and frying chitlings.  Bagpipers and fiddlers.  Singers and dancers.

The end of the day at dusk they lit the bonfire built of logs and kindling.  And sure enough, Papa Noel showed up!  He distributed satsumas grown on the property to everyone.

We had Sawyer in his wagon.  He ran around for a while gathering sticks

with the other kids.  Then he found the bell.

That was it.  He wanted to ring the bell over and over.  It was heavy to pull and very loud.  I had to hold him and pull the bell with some considerable force.  I guess we will go back there every year and see if he is big and strong enough to pull that bell yet!

 Keep scrolling down and see the bonfire and Papa Noel as he was seen in the 1700s and 1800s here in Cajun Louisiana.

 

 

Not Your Momma's Asterisk

Ok, so I didn't exactly use the numbers like I said.  I went another way.  More work, more stuff.  More more.  Not sure what the center will be just yet.   Maybe more white.  Maybe the circles or dots.  I will test and see.

And here is something on the weird side.  We had lunch at Chicken Salad Chick.  They have chicken salad 14 ways.  And only chicken salad.  And it's not bad actually.  I don't know if they are a chain or just a local store. 

 But they are pretty good and not any fried food and french fries.


Frank was home Wednesday so I suggested he go in the pool with Sawyer for his Swim Class.  Sawyer was not happy about that change out however.  You would have thought we had switched him out with some random stranger who was trying shatter his universe! He kept looking at and me and back at Frank and saying MAMA emphatically and pointing to me.  He screamed and cried the whole class.   And I couldn't pretend he was someone else's spoiled kid, he was all mine! 

He was curl his body up when he was supposed to be floating and he would push the ducks away when Miss Erin would push them to him to distract his tears.
 
I didn't bring my bathing suit because I didn't think it would be such an important thing, you know.  So he was kinda stuck with Papa for the class.  And he let the whole facility know he was not happy about that one bit!

I had no idea I was so pivotal to world peace!


 So we took him home, fed him some sticks and he was fine.

Why My Quilt Room is So Messy All the Time

Why do I hate to put on labels?  They are way simpler than the entire thing of the quilt and the quilting.  And it is usually the very last thing I do to a quilt so that means it is finished.  Maybe that is it, the quilt is over.

By the look of my quilting room (and house most likely) we all know I am somewhat of a pack rat.  I get that honestly though.  My grandfather was a "collector" of things.  He was an amazing man who could make anything out of anything.  Like that guy they drop in remote places like the desert with only a bicycle, or the Arctic with only a parachute.  That was my grandfather.  And he did those things too.  With my grandmother by his side.

I called him Papa.  He was Midwest Kansas stock born in a "dugout" house on the prairie near Galena.  His family had come from the Northeast area with the Mayflower group.  And they proudly carried those stories with them over the generations.  And my grandmother came from Alsace Lorraine, that no man's land between France and Germany.  Her family was weary from generations of French and German and English armies conquering them.

So when they met, they saw the adventure in each other.  That did not stop my grandfather from taking a mistress, and my grandmother from ignoring it.  He gave up the house my mother grew up in on So.Liberty Street in New Orleans after my grandmother died and moved to my grandmother's Aunt's home on LaSalle Street in an upscale uptown neighborhood near Audubon Park.  He would take me to ride the flying horses in the Children's area.

The LaSalle Street home had a huge back yard that was exquisitely planted with odd yet fashionable plantings  that were the most marvelous playground a child ever had.  I could hide in one corner, live in the jungle in another, camp out by the "pond", swing from the huge oak tree branches that touched the ground.  And the stuff!  All the marvelous stuff he had.

He had a wringer washer he used until he moved from there to marry his mistress.  He would take boys from the street he found hitchhiking and bring them to live upstairs.  They would learn how to fix cars and appliances and make parts from nothing.  Then they would be able to find a girlfriend and support her as a wife.

Countless boys grew to manhood with my grandfather.  And I his only grandchild.  Imagine that.  My mother forbade him to get me dirty so I had to sit and watch when I really wanted to be in there "fixing" stuff.  She would put me in these beautiful dresses and I would go sit and watch my grandfather and his boys get dirty.

That is why I don't wear dresses today!  LOL.

One of the only pictures I have of my grandfather is one I took the day he met Carrie, his great-granddaughter.  He died shortly after that, at the age of 88.  Which is an amazing fact because he did not believe in doctors, survived smallpox as a child, and chain smoked his own rolled unfiltered cigarettes and drank a gallon of whatever was handy each day.  And at age 80, my father had to go bail him out of jail for soliciting a prostitute in the parking lot of his local grocery!

Yes that was my grandfather!  Adventurous, messy and a pack rat.  Describes me to a T!

glen