BUCK DAY

Those of you who may be from some areas of PA may recognize this term. It is not a day to count the bucks we spent on Black Friday. The Monday after Thanksgiving is Buck Day - The first day of hunting season. The schools are closed and even the place where my husband worked chose this day as one of the yearly paid holidays. There is no use holding school as most of the students and many of the teachers take off anyway to go hunting. I remember once though, when I was a grad student at Penn State saying something about Buck Day and fellow students and even my professor looked at me crazily...they had never heard of such a thing.

In our household we used the day for other things. Since my husband didn't hunt and I didn't have to work at school, we started our Christmas decorations. This was the day that our tree was erected and decorated and weather permitting (alas sometimes we had snow drifts) we put out our outside lights. I got out my Christmas shirts, sweaters, and jewelry. (In my classroom and office people would wait to see what I was going to wear each day between Thanksgiving and Christmas!) We had such fun family time.

I miss Buck Day times now that my children are gone and we are empty nesters. We still talk about getting the decorations done but it takes us much longer. This year I did get the Thanksgiving things put away, the fall door decoration is down, and my winter quilt hung on the wall. The red placemats are on the dining room table and furniture is moved to make room for the tree.

This year I did get the Christmas spirit because our guild had our auction and pot luck this morning. There were so many wonderful Christmas gifts auctioned off today! And I am still stuffed from the lunch we had. This was also the first month of our Secret Sisters so I got my first Christmas present. A gift certificate from one of the quilt shops I haunt. What a wonderful gift...now the fun of guessing who my secret sister is begins!

Well since I didn't get everything done on Buck Day that I hoped I can still be optomistic. In two weeks it will be DOE DAY.