A is for …

Three of things that I enjoy most about Kauai are summed up in the following picture:

Update: Even though Mark’s comment does not doubt the photo was taken in winter, I feel I should reveal it was taken on December 27, 2005. I don’t remember avocados throughout the previous winter, but either I wasn’t paying attention or the very hot and dry December had some influence.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m a bit late with the post, but at least it’s still the Thanksgiving weekend.

While Thanksgiving might be associated with cold weather and leaf raking in North America, I have no qualms about celebrating Thanksgiving in Hawaii, as I do Halloween. Thanksgiving was brought to Hawaii by the missionaries, probably more as a cultural memory of home than as a religious celebration. However, it was originally a harvest festival, and Hawaiians historically celebrated the Makahiki festival starting around this time. Although food plants grow year-round in Hawaii, the winter rains and shorter days weren’t ideal for the taro Hawaiian taro farming and the last major harvest was in November. Makahiki was a 4-month season of peace, feasting, games, and praying for the next year’s crops.

While Thanksgiving has become a football and shopping blitz here as well, I like to think of the good side of Thanksgiving, where pilgrims created a new holiday for the New World, outside of the religious calendar but religious in their own persaonl way, where families get together, and where each and every one looks inside themselves to ponder what they should be grateful for. One seasonal event we can be thankful for here in Hawaii is the end of the hurricane season (June 1-November 30). And a feast is a good way to start eating all the canned food we’ve been stockpiling:

Actually, that is only half of what we have, nor does it show the 12 gallons (45 liters) of drinking water in jugs. We start buying lots of cans and soy milk as they go on sale all spring and summer, and we’ll eat them all winter and spring so we can get new ones next year. Not having lived through a hurricane and its aftermath, I have no idea if this is the right amount of food. We can at least avoid the stress of shortages when a hurricane gets near, and I think we could live 2 weeks with what we have.

Geckos & Other Guests

Our friend Gabriela Taylor just published her first book about Kaua’i, subtitled Tales of a Kaua’i Bed & Breakfast. After 30-some years on Kaua’i, she says she’s finally starting to feel and be treated like a local. And she has lots of great stories going all the way back to the Hippie camps in the 70’s (although Taylor camp was not named after her).

From the book’s website (designed by my wife Sonja) where you can also read excerpts and buy the book:

“Life at a B&B is often so alluring that many guests fantasize about retiring in paradise and running one of their own. Author Gabriela Taylor does not entirely dispel this image, for she built and ran a B&B for twelve years on the island of Kaua‘i.”

You can also buy the book at the Borders in Kukui Grove, where Gabriela will soon have a talk-story and sign books.

I’ll file this under History because I don’t think I’ll have enough Literary entries to justify starting a new category.

Haunted Yard

Some neighbors a few blocks away put up a lot of house and yard decorations for most of the major holdiays. They had lots of lights at Christmas and some figures at Easter. Now they are going all out for Halloween, with a big banner that reads “Haunted Yard.”

At first they only put up the skeletons and gallows (and guillotine for us francophiles) and made it look like a graveyard. They lit it up with some lights, and I thought they had already done too much work, considering how much I like Halloween:

But then today, they filled the yard with grotesquely costumed mannequins all over the yard. They set out several veritable dioramas of witches, monsters, and ghouls. I talked to a lady working on the setup, and she said they invite people to come and walk through. There was also a large awning tent covered in black plastic, and I gather they have some sort of haunted house set up in there with spaghetti guts and grape eyeballs to feel:

It’s late already, but if you want to see it, it’s on Lanakila Street in the Wailua Houselots. It must be a success because we can actually hear people screaming over in that direction!

Unhappy Halloween

I’m a sort of Halloween Grinch, especially here in Hawaii where the season just doesn’t fit. There’s a certain aspect of facing death and pushing oneself into fearful situations that I find meaningful, but all the fake fright and ugly decorations seem so contrived. For example, it just seems trite to wish someone a “happy Halloween.” Then there’s the whole costume effect that causes people to go a bit wild, but that seems like it more fun during carnival. I guess Halloween has taken the place of carnival in America, although Mardi Gras is making a comeback.

Here on Kauai, it just doesn’t feel like Halloween. It’s still hot, summer is barely winding down, the sky is still mostly blue, and everything is even more green in the winter. I can understand the orange and black colors in a misty New England forests, but here they just don’t match the mood. We even went swimming in the ocean today, but come to think of it we did get a scare: we saw a school of fish jumping out of the water, which was murky, and I was afraid that might mean there was a predator around.

Anyways, I don’t want to steal Halloween for anyone, especially the children, so we carved two jack-0-lanterns and are giving away candy tonight. Just to show we can have fun on Halloween, the first is a Hawaiian jack-o-lantern, a papaya getting a tan in the pineapple patch:

The second is a traditional orange pumpkin, though I was happy to see it was grown in Hawaii and not shipped from the mainland: