Lantern Walk, Truffles, and Italian pigs

I LOVE holidays!! Thanksgiving is not my favorite as I feel so bad for the turkeys and I’m not a football fan, but, I love the energy and excitement of people getting off work and spending time with their families.
George, my little gourmand, has been like a kid in a candy store. He ordered a truffle from Italy and it arrived this morning on ice. He came into the bedroom where the kids and I were playing holding a little sheer red bag tied with a ribbon, his eyes glowing with delight. Inside the littel bag–one tiny $50 truffle dug up by an italian pig. he gave it to us to smell–nasty–but he’s very excited to make truffle pasta for us vegetarians tomorrow. All day his little gourmet devices have been arriving–pasta maker, pasta dryer, truffle shaver, etc. He and Annabelle made some of his incredible homemade bread this morning. It’s still rising on top of the refrigerator right now.
Annabelle is very excited over all the happenings. We made lanterns while Henry was sleeping. I took some of the watercolors we’ve been doing and we cut little shapes (stars, moons, etc.) out of them and Annabelle taped tissue paper over the shapes. I rolled the cut paper into a cylinder and stapled it together, folding the bottom and cutting little slits so it all folded together. We glued the bottoms, stapled on another watercolor paper strip for a handle, and voila! A lantern!
We had a lantern walk tonight, adding little votive candles into the bottom of the lanterns. Both kids were very careful. When we did lantern walks in November on the Vineyard, we would walk around this amazing farm. All you could see were tiny glowing lanterns under the stars. It smelled like fire and cold air and we’d sing some sweet song. Lantern walks are my favorite Waldorf tradition, typically done in November as the calendar year heads towards the longest night of the year on Winter Solstice in December. The point of the walk besides creating community and ritual is to remind us to light our own inner light during the long dark wintertime.
It’s not safe enough here in New Orleans to even walk around our neighborhood after dark, so we had a lantern walk around the billiards room. We sang–Annabelle made up songs– and I told Annabelle that the sunlight is growing shorter every day, so the little candles help to remind us that we can light our own candles inside ourselves to get through any amount of darkness. At the end, we said three things we were thankful for and blew out the candles.
There’s something so lovely and comforting about lanterns to me. Lighting up the darkness, guarding the flame, illuminating the night, dispelling fear…
We all loved it.
And I just want to say what I’m thankful for: George, Henry, and Annabelle, my dear family, my loving friends, the magic of New Orleans, the magic of the Vineyard, the flowers blooming on my balcony (especially the nightblooming jasmine which intoxicates me every night as it fills the living room), the teeming life here–spanish moss, beautifully gnarled oak trees, second line parades, mardi gras indians, and people who can create a festival around a sandwich (we attended the packed po boy festival this weekend, a po boy being a New Orleans sandwich.), the fabulous sultry sensuality of belly dancing, bare feet, red toes, bubble baths, stawberries and champagne, fairy lights in the trees, the stunning moon, well, I could go on and on.
Suffice to say, I have so much to be grateful for.