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Most of Montana Free Press’ reporters and editors are off work Thursday and Friday to accommodate the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming next week, but for this edition of the Lowdown we’re taking a minute to share our favorite holiday traditions and reflect on what we’re thankful for at the end of a long year (that, if you remember, opened with a four-month legislative session!).
One thing I’m grateful for are the comments people leave us when they donate to support MTFP’s work. It gives us a glimpse of the reasons people are sending some of their hard-earned money our way:
- “I give because I want truthful and honest news about [what’s] happening where I live, my city, county, state, and my country.”
- “We need good independent journalism like MTFP offers.”
- “I love your work, keep it up! Thank you so much for the excellent stories and keeping us informed with real facts.”
Good journalism doesn’t matter if it doesn’t find an audience. These brief testimonials remind me how appreciative I am for all the Montanans who take the time to read our stories, learn something about the place we call home and use it to engage in our communities. Our work is meant for you, and I’m thankful you’ve found it.
— Holly Michels
On Our Holiday Radar 🦃
Amanda — Sometime after Thanksgiving, I make my way into the Custer Gallatin National Forest with my husband and our sons to cut down a Christmas tree. If there’s sufficient snow, we’ll don skis to more efficiently find and drag out our find. I’m most interested in a tree that’s growing in a bunch with others, which can make for an oddly proportioned find but feels a bit more like a forest-thinning strategy.
Holly — The start of the holiday season for me as a kid was marked by the day and night I’d spend at my Grandma Bake’s (aptly named) house preparing, baking and decorating Christmas cookies and treats for upcoming family gatherings. We filled her kitchen and dining table with TV snacks (Chex mix for the uninitiated), buckeyes, red-and-white dough twisted and baked into candy cane shapes and a legion of gingerbread people. This year I’m buying a dinosaur cookie cutter and food-safe paint so I can watch my toddler continue the tradition.
Lauren — When I think of the holidays I think of sounds and pictures. I listen to Nat King Cole’s Christmas album and I hear the loud laughter of friends and family while watching Elf. I picture the Ace Hardware parking lot where we would buy our Christmas tree, little snowflakes floating past our front room window and a messy kitchen — pots, pans and dirty plates of a holiday meal lining the countertops. This year, I’m trying the opposite. In lieu of a trip home for Thanksgiving, a friend and I got an Airbnb in a cute mountain town. We’re embracing silence, peace and nature. We’re filling our day with exploring the outdoors, bad Lifetime movies, knitting and hot spring trips. We’re calling it a “heals-giving.” This Thanksgiving break I’m taking space, time and silence to reflect, because I know I’ll get all the chaos I crave when I go home for Christmas.
JoVonne — After Oct. 31, all I see is pumpkin pie this and pumpkin pie that. That’s not for me, nor for my family. We live and breathe sweet potato pie during the holiday season, a tradition that my father has helped carry on from his mother and siblings. We take it so seriously that pumpkin pie is officially barred from the Thanksgiving table. I pity the cousin who brings a store-bought pumpkin pie this year.
Nora — I have to disagree with JoVonne, pumpkin pie is for me! I always have pumpkin pie for breakfast the morning after Thanksgiving and every morning after that until it’s gone. It’s my own personal tradition.
Matt — This week, my family will once again use the same electric tabletop rotisserie that cooked the turkey when I was a child. In addition to its age, it’s not enclosed in any way and could probably be considered a fire hazard. At the very least, it’s a hazard to clean floors. But it makes a good bird.
Katie — Every summer while visiting the family cabin on Lake Wenatchee in Washington, my sister and I visit a Christmas store — aptly named Kris Kringl — in the Bavarian-style village of Leavenworth and pick out a new ornament. In recent years, we’ve changed from shopping with our parents to our partners, but it’s been fun to carry on the tradition and compare everyone’s finds. This year, we brought home a gingerbread camper trailer, a Pikachu, a fairy riding a snail and a woodsy outhouse with a working door and a surprised occupant. Decorating the tree with our ornaments collected throughout the years is always a fun trip down memory lane.
Tom — As soon as it gets cold enough to chill a turkey on the back porch, I put a 17-pounder in a Home Depot bucket and brine it in Guinness until it looks like a Tootsie Roll. Then I stuff it with sourdough croutons, pistachios, mushrooms, figs, sausage, thyme, sage and butter. Needless to say, the gravy is awesome. I usually go with a Hutterite bird or an organic one. A turkey pretreated with sodium won’t take the brine. I’ll keep this up until they stop selling whole turkeys at the grocery store. At some point I’ll crack open Damon Runyon’s “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” and read it at the dinner table.
Mara — In our family, my mom is famous for turning all kinds of tiny treasures into stocking stuffers. There’s usually some version of fruit — a pear, an orange, a pomegranate — lodged in the stocking toe, a fancier-than-normal chocolate bar, some kind of comforting tea and maybe a pair of earrings wrapped in a little envelope of delicate paper. In the gift-buying season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’m on the lookout for all kinds of small-scale gifts to try to match her stocking skills.
Eric — With the near-entirety of my extended family living on the West Coast, winter holidays often mean daylong drives traveling back. I’ve learned to cherish that windshield time over the years — eastern Washington in late fall is typically pretty dismal as it flies past at a speed that is I swear is no faster than the posted limit, but it’s become a ritual that provides a rare stretch of uninterrupted hours for quiet reflection.
Zeke — I visit my high school alma mater this time each year to measure whether I lived up to the expectations of my former educators. To my chagrin, I found my English teachers are surprised that I’m a writer. My math teachers aren’t. I also check to make sure my favorite faculty — mostly historians old enough to have lived through their own classroom curriculum — are still alive. No bad news yet.
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