On Wednesday, we celebrated by dressing as pirates and having pizza and cupcakes with some law school friends at Aunt (rich-NYC-corporate-lawyer) Jenn's house.
Some people may accuse us of causing holiday-confusion (**see below**) by blurring the line between Halloween and Thanksgiving, but actually Joseph was just showing off for his NY-savvy Aunt Jenn by proving to her that he was familiar with the once-celebrated-but-now-forgotten-New-York-holiday known as "Ragamuffin Day."
Children trick-or-treating on Ragamuffin Day 1911Here's one recollection of Ragamuffin Day
Children would dress in raggedy clothing and blacken their faces with a burnt piece of cork to resemble hobos. They would go door to door in groups, stand outside the houses and yell the refrain, "Anything f' Thanksgiv'n". The goal was to get people to open their windows and throw pennies down to the eagerly awaiting children.(Description of Ragamuffin Day stolen from this website.)
Joseph had so much fun dressing up as someone who had gotten burnt cork (or a thrown penny) in his eye, that Ragamuffin Day is now an official family tradition in this household (I also went outside one day last week and realized that I had dressed him like a hobo, but that's another story).
Then on Thursday, everyone was so happy about Joseph's half birthday that Todd's whole family got together and we had a huge turkey dinner.
Lucky Joseph!
More shots of Joseph enjoying his feast:
If you're wondering where I found that sweet Ragamuffin Day image, you can find it, and tons of great photos from the past at the following website: www.shorpy.com
**Holiday Confusion: This is the technical term for a severe and often disabling disorder characterized by an individual's inability to distinguish when one holiday begins and another one ends. It most commonly manifests itself through disorganized thinking and speech regarding when holidays actually occur resulting in significant social and occupational dysfunctions. Onset occurs during a child's formative years when the child's extended family "moves" Thanksgiving up a day so that Christmas can be celebrated the following day. The staging of Santa's visit a full calendar month early typically leads to a sudden and irrational fear of traditional religious imagery.
5 comments:
Can you please write a column? Or anything? I love your posts, Todd.
Almost as much as I love the pictures of Joseph.
I agree. Great posts. And, I think Joseph might need a real eye patch after the way he was wearing his fake one (see first picture).
and these comments are from lindsey, just using my alias "keegan".
dangit. of course we love to hear from lindsey but we were so excited about our first comment from keegan!
today Caleb and I looked at blogs and he liked yours because it had a kid like him. We watched videos and he LOVED it. His favorite was of Joseph chasing the birds (Caleb can relate) and we watched it multiple times.
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