{"id":1495,"date":"2017-11-17T06:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T14:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2017-11-16T18:33:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T02:33:57","slug":"savor-the-seasons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/11\/17\/savor-the-seasons\/","title":{"rendered":"Savor the Seasons"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I went to a GNO last night\u2014a girls night out, for all of you guys out there. It\u2019s a once a year event called Savor the Seasons at my daughter\u2019s church, Eastridge on the Sammamish Plateau. \u00a0For my daughter, a widow and a\u00a0single mom, Savor the Seasons is her one big night out for the year. It\u2019s also a loving gift she shares with her mother and with several good friends.

For the evening\u2014or rather for two evenings in a row\u2014the pews in the sanctuary disappear, replaced by 69 tables of eight. Each table is decorated to the\u00a0nth-degree complete with thematic centerpieces, good family china, chargers, glassware, linens, and napkins. \u00a0Every table is a sparkling creation\u00a0designed by one or more women from the church. \u00a0The tables are set for Monday\u2019s event, then cleared away afterwards, washed, and reset for the\u00a0second night. It is an enormous undertaking.

For those two nights, the total attendance is around 1300. \u00a0Dinner is a buffet chosen from recipes submitted to a committee and then cooked by more\u00a0women from the church with men from the church working the tables; serving coffee and water; running the sound system and lights; and working in the\u00a0kitchen.

Savor the Seasons is a celebration that takes place on the edge of the stressful cliff that constitutes the holiday season\u2014Thanksgiving, Christmas, and\u00a0New Years, all in a row. \u00a0The dinner is a time and a place for a few deep breaths before taking the holiday plunge.

It\u2019s a church so after the meal\u2014delicious by the way\u2014there\u2019s a sermon from the \u201cpastor\u2019s wife.\u201d \u00a0Having gone for several years, I think of Cheryl Jamison\u00a0more as a straight out pastor than a pastor’s wife, but maybe that\u2019s just me.

I\u2019ve been attending Savor the Seasons for several years now. \u00a0The first time I went, I was still deep in a severe case of I-don\u2019t-need-hearing-aids denial.\u00a0\u00a0So that first year, I sat through the sermon and missed the whole thing. \u00a0Now that I can hear Cheryl\u2019s talks, I can tell you they\u2019re consistently on the\u00a0money.

A couple of years ago, everyone was given a little trinket bracelet made up of what looked like keys from an old fashioned Underwood typewriter\u2014you\u00a0know, the kind I actually learned to type on. \u00a0The talk that time around was all about finding your backspace when things get too stressful. \u00a0Years later,\u00a0when I\u2019m doing my passable imitation of Evie Busk\u2019s tight-lipped disdain, my daughter will whisper a coded message to me: \u00a0Backspace. \u00a0And you know\u00a0what? \u00a0It helps. \u00a0Backspace\u2014it\u2019s permission for a tiny do over and some breathing space.

The inspiration for this year’s dinner was\u00a0Breakfast at Tiffany’s<\/i>. \u00a0In preparation for her sermon, Cheryl decided to review the movie and was shocked by\u00a0what she found there. \u00a0 What she remembered as being a sweet romantic comedy turned out to be something quite a bit more problematic. \u00a0(I think I\u2019d\u00a0have the same kind of reaction to seeing\u00a0Gigi<\/i>\u00a0in this day and age.) Still, in keeping with the theme, this year\u2019s trinket was a bracelet made of fake pearls\u00a0while the sermon was about real pearls. \u00a0

A pearl starts out as an uncomfortable grain of sand caught up in an oyster\u2019s gut. \u00a0In an attempt to fix the pain, the oyster covers the pearl with a kind of\u00a0internal chemistry that eventually turns into a pearl inside the oyster and into mother of pearl on the inside of the oyster\u2019s shell. \u00a0With pearls something\u00a0difficult or painful is transformed into a thing of beauty. \u00a0Diamonds are hard and can be cut and shaped. \u00a0Pearls are the way they are when they emerge\u00a0from the oyster. \u00a0Any attempt to shape them turns them to dust.

After last night, my daughter and I will have another addition to our code word arsenal. \u00a0Pearls will now join “with eyebrows\u201d and \u201cbackspace\u201d as part of\u00a0our underground mother\/daughter conversations.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
With the holidays coming, you never can tell when one of those code words will come in handy.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went to a GNO last night\u2014a girls night out, for all of you guys out there. It\u2019s a once a year event called Savor the Seasons at my daughter\u2019s church, Eastridge on the Sammamish Plateau. \u00a0For my daughter, a widow and a\u00a0single mom, Savor the Seasons is her one big night out for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-o7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1496,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions\/1496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}