Sometimes Jam Today

Yes, apparently it's that time again...

Café stalwarts will be aware that, while Mr. Muscato is a man of few quirks (especially given that he's had more than a decade of living with me up with which to put), one of them is distinctly seasonal.  Now, it seems, is the season, and so we've spent a highly domestic weekend making jam.

Since we had a day or two earlier indulged in a particularly pungent fish curry, that's probably all to the good, for our if not for our neighbors' sake, and now the house has a pleasant tang of cooked fruit and hot sugar - and we have a tidy line-up of some two dozen jars of various sizes.  They're divided, about equally in half, between two batches:  one a comparatively traditional favorite, strawberry-raspberry-tomato, and the other a more daring venture, papaya persimmon.  We're deeply enjoying our new digs' proximity to international grocery stores, where one can find all sorts of things undreamt of at your average Giant, Safeway, or Whole Paycheck.

Having lunched on the fruit, as it were, of our labors, I can attest that the berry combo is dynamite for sandwiches, while I think the exotic medley will be rather a treat as a savory, on toast points with some chèvre.  Now all we have to do is start entertaining.

The coming week is a holiday for us, and in the midst of it a quick motor up to the coast to my Dear Sister's for Thanksgiving just outside Boston.  DS and Mrs. Sister (as it were) are planning an old-fashioned family get-together, where we will do our best to recreate the festivities of days gone by, sans, one hopes, the soppy tipsiness and lingering recriminations.  And apparently we're going to see some Goyas at the MFA, which certainly sounds improving.  My great-nephew and -niece will be there, and it's odd to think that I'm at something like the age now at which my own great-aunts would have been when I first remember them.  It half makes me want to ensure I smell faintly of powder, Evening in Paris, and Pall Malls, just so they'll have the sense memory.  I fear, though, that they'll have to settle for Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet (one's winter scent, doncha know) and Altoids.

In any case, we'll take some jam.  How's about you?  Any particularly amusing and/or appalling observances by Yankee readers of our Universal National Observance?