Thanksgiving has come and gone. It’s the third Thanksgiving since my husband Roy died and the holiday has changed for me. It’s a change with Roy and me not hosting the family gathering, and what’s left of our family melting away. But luckily, friends have become family and for the third year, I got to spend Thanksgiving with Lloyd and Kristin Shirley on their farm – Hawkglen.
Roy and I met Kristin Shirley at the Houston Boat Show in January 1987. We were there when she married Lloyd. We shared holidays with them and their families every year and they have been there for me since Roy died. This year, I was lucky enough to help her create the Thanksgiving feast. We cooked for two days. There was a lot of food. Beyond cooking, we got to feed and play with their goats. There are 23 of them. They all have names, but don’t ask me who’s who – I can’t keep up. But there were four week-old “kids” and they were in that “I have springs on my feet” stage.
Kristin and Lloyd give their goats treats to get them into the barn at night and for feeding. They treat them with – you guessed it – animal crackers. One of the new “kids” was Gertie – a cute, curious goat who tried to eat my pants. She let me pick her up and hold her for about five minutes – an eternity for a baby goat.
Kristin, Lloyd and I had a great time cooking, eating and playing with the goats. We watched an old holiday movie I hadn’t seen, “Last Holiday.” But the best part of the visit was the nightly Scrabble game(s). We are all about even with word usage, so the games are challenging. The only thing that makes a winner within the three of us is who got the best letters – and if Kristin is on her game at strategy. She is better at making multiple words with one word than either her husband or me. In that kind of game, one word can make you a ton of points – and that’s what she did Thursday night.
First let me tell you, when we play, we don’t play cutthroat Scrabble – we’ll all be friends even after a very – shall we say – stimulating game. So we allow each other to look up a possible word instead of challenging after the fact. But Lloyd and I did question a word Kristin came up with that completed three other words and made her a ton of points. She won the game – by a lot – because of that word. But come on, have any of you ever heard of the word “tharm?” That was her Hail Mary word – and turned out to be a real word meaning “belly.” Even AI questions that word. Well Lloyd and I failed that challenge, but he began singing, “Old McDonald had a tharm” … We all started laughing. The spirit of the moment hit me and I started singing, “Well life on the ‘tharm’ is kinda laid back …” At this point we were laughing so hard tears were running down our cheeks and we could hardly catch our breath.
None of us had ever heard the word used before, but it is a word. Who said you can’t learn something new from a board game? And with Christmas on its way, we thought how things would be different if Clement-Clarke Moore used this word correctly in “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
“Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round tharm
That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.”
I mean, what rhymes with “tharm?” I guess it’s important what words you choose to use. In this case, “tharm” loses something in the translation.
