No Christmas carols in our house till the day after Thanksgiving. Here’s a good one to start with. Not a carol, really, as an expression of folk, um, piety:

A father and son revive traditional tweed craft in Ireland. Excerpt:

Weaving used to be one of Donegal’s largest industries, but today it’s almost gone. Unlike Harris & Lewis, where Harris Tweed is made, there are no trade protections for Donegal Tweed. Anyone can call anything “Donegal Tweed.” If you see a tweed in the store in a Donegal style, it was most likely woven on the cheap in China or Italy.

When Shaun and Kieran started making tweed again, there was only one tweed mill left in Donegal. Their factory, if you can call it that, sits just a few steps from the house where Kieran grew up… and where his father Shaun was raised. Something like half a dozen generations of weavers have lived there, in fact.

These guys aren’t quaint, and they’re not museum pieces for tourists to gawk at. They’re two sharp businessmen determined to develop a craft that has helped define who they were, who their families were, and what their home is. I think that’s pretty spectacular.

Me too. Order from them here.

(H/T: Michael Brendan Dougherty)

UPDATE: I can’t believe I wrote “Scotland.” I know better. Have changed the post. Thanks for the heads-ups.

And how is your Black Friday going? Better than these people’s, I hope:

LOS ANGELES — A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.

The incident occurred shortly after 10:20 p.m. Thursday in a crowded Los Angeles-area Walmart as shoppers hungry for deals were let inside the store.

Police said the suspect shot the pepper spray when the coverings over the items she wanted were removed.

What is it with people?

Congratulations to our Catholic friends on finally being able to welcome the new Mass translation this weekend. Liz Tenety tells you everything you need to know to get ready for it. 

Any Catholic readers have any thoughts about it? Excited? Scared? Angry? Confused? Tell us.

I think I’d be over the moon. If you missed it the first time I posted it, check out Anthony Esolen’s essay praising, indeed celebrating, the new trantlsaiton translation.

What did I eat today? What didn’t I eat? I ate it all. And it was all good. Finally got the chipotle sweet potato puree down to an acceptable level of heat. I took some of it down the street to our friends, who were busy perfecting their salted caramel pie. I tasted some of the ruined (the texture was off) first one, and man, you can count me in for making a salted caramel pie for Christmas. It’s the stuff.

Back home, our guests turned up with a pecan pie and a coconut pie. Coconut pie! I haven’t had that in years. I ate several pieces, and despite a big cup of strong coffee, I succumbed to the food stupids and ended up crashing in bed for a glorious nap. One of our friends had passed out from tryptophan poisoning in my big leather chair. It seemed like the thing to do.

I don’t think anybody had dinner. We were too full. I sipped on some kirsch all evening to recalibrate my insides. Ever had it? It’s cherry eau de vie. Wonderful stuff. I first had it at a seder dinner at Spengler’s house — one of the many memorable, wonderful elements of that evening. Sipping kirsch and talking with old friends is not a bad way to spend a late autumn evening.

Tomorrow: back to the gym. No getting around it. Think I’ll take the kids to see “Hugo” as well. No shopping! No how, no way.

I’m going to be taking the rest of the day off to cook, to eat, and to be with friends and family. Before I go, I’d like to start an open thread in which we all list the things we are in particular thankful for today. If I started to list all of mine, I’d be here all day. Here’s a short list, in no hierarchical order:

The opportunity to write for TAC. I am never short of words for anything, but I am this morning, in trying to articulate how much it means to me to have been able to return to full-time writing. I’m not going to name names because I don’t want to embarrass folks, but the people on the business and editorial side of the magazine, and the donors whose generosity made it possible for me to return to writing, have my unending gratitude.

The life my sister led. This is the first Thanksgiving without my sister Ruthie, who died of cancer in September. I give thanks for the life she led — for her exemplary kindness, for her fidelity, and for her grace under pressure.

The community that helped my family. I have written at length about the goodness of the people  — see here and here, for example — of St. Francisville and the surrounding area who walked with Ruthie, her husband Mike and kids, and my mom and dad throughout this cancer, and in the aftermath of her death. Really, this is what it means to live, and to love, as people should. I especially thank Dr. Tim Lindsey, who made a house call to take care of Mike when the limb knocked him off the ladder this week, causing Mike to break his leg. Hell of a year that poor man has had.

My Philadelphia friends. Three weeks from yesterday, we’ll leave Philly. Today, I’m thinking especially about all the good friends we’ve made here, and how sorry I am to leave them. I’m grateful for their friendship, which will not end just because we’re moving away. For that matter, I’m grateful to have had two years in one of the most beautiful parts of America. And for four actual seasons in a year. And for all the great beer around here — from the craft brewers at Yards and Victory, to the pubs in Center City that serve Belgian beers, in particular the most god-like of all beers in my personal pantheon, lambic. Sour beer is a glorious thing. If you’ve never had it, oh boy, you’re missing out.

America. Living in Philadelphia and homeschooling the kids has caused me to pay more attention to the details of Revolutionary War history. Literally, a stone’s throw from where I sit writing this, Gen. Washington and his beaten Continentals retreated from the Battle of Germantown, the first leg of what ended up being their march to Valley Forge, and that cruel winter. When you get into the weeds of Revolutionary War history, and realize how easily things could have gone disastrously wrong for us, you cannot help but be grateful to Providence for the patriots’ victory. And when you’ve lived through a cold winter here, and you have been to the site of the Valley Forge encampment, the intensity of the Continentals’ suffering, and the miracle of their endurance, becomes more manifest in one’s imagination.

Of course, had the British won, it might be easier today to find proper scones and clotted cream around here. So there’s that.

France.Just because. Don’t hassle me here, jack. Jacques. Qu’est-ce que whatever. I’m looking at the bottles of Beaune I’ve laid out for later today, and reflecting on the Gopnik book, which I’m thoroughly enjoying, and thinking, “God bless France.” Which brings me to…

Moore Bros. Which has kept me in good wine (and therefore happiness) these past two years, and which introduced me to good wines I never would have found otherwise (I’m looking at you, Riesling; who knew you could be so deliciously dry?)

OK, enough. I have work to do in the kitchen. Open thread.

Notre Dame law professor Mark McKenna writes a powerful essay about how the Penn State scandal forced him to confront his own sexual abuse at the hands of a coach. He talks about it publicly for the first time in this stunning piece. Excerpts:

I cried uncontrollably at least three separate times last week. This is part of what makes abuse so wretched—it strips you of control, not only of your body in those moments of abuse, but of your mind long after. Sometimes emotions just sneak up on you. And even when you know difficult conversations are going to arise and you try to steel yourself, sometimes there’s nothing you can do. The emotions come, and you can’t make them go away. Then you hate yourself for feeling so weak and exposed. You are sure everyone is looking at you, and you know that no one would look at you the same way if they knew your story. They’d see you as damaged goods. Or they’d pity you. It’s hard to know which is worse.

But as the story has remained in the headlines and the uncomfortable conversations have continued, I haven’t been able to shake an overwhelming feeling that I failed Sandusky’s victims and, by extension, far too many other boys. Abuse thrives on silence. In some cases, as the Penn State situation makes clear, the silence of third parties gives perpetrators license. But victims’ silence also plays a huge role. This is true in the immediate aftermath of the abuse, where victims’ inability to speak out puts them (and others) at further risk. It’s also true much more generally. Several of my friends, for example, were shocked when Rick Reilly reported that, according to a 1998 study on child sexual abuse by Boston University Medical School, one in six boys in America will be abused by age 16. For girls, it’s one in four by the age of 14. They were shocked, no doubt, because concrete examples of abuse are not as available to them as the statistics suggest. Most people don’t think they know any abuse victims.

But they do know victims. They just don’t realize it, because so many of us have been unable to reveal ourselves. This breeds a false sense of security, with too many adults believing abuse is someone else’s problem.

Please read the whole thing. It’s amazing — and it’s convicting. McKenna says one reason child sexual abuse continues to happen is the veil of silence around it. He said abusers create such overwhelming shame in their victims that living with that inner torment seems better to them than to speak to another about what happened. Reading this, I recalled an old friend telling me earlier this year about sexual abuse my friend suffered at the age of five or six. Suddenly, so much about my friend’s lifetime of emotional difficulty and pain made sense. Most stunning of all to me, here was someone who has been close to me for many years, and who knows how strongly I feel about child sexual abuse because of my writing, and who therefore knew I was someone “safe” to talk to about this … and yet who only this year felt able to speak the words about this person’s own experience. I don’t think anybody in my friend’s own family knows about this (the abuser was not a family member, I’m told, but a family friend, now dead). And when my friend “came out” to me, I observed the body language — the cringing, the cowering, the overwhelming presence of shame. It was a shattering moment of testimony to the power of evil, to the spell this kind of evil casts on its victims. I told my friend that it wasn’t my friend’s fault. This my friend knows — but it’s one thing to know something in one’s mind, and quite another to know it in one’s bones.

McKenna, the professor, goes on to say that one reason he’s speaking out about his abuse is to counter the myth that abusers are “monsters” that we can see coming. We can’t. He writes:

Predators do not look like monsters; they look like your neighborhood basketball coach or the guy running a children’s charity. They look like people you know, because they are. This is so important for parents to realize: If you allow yourself to think of these predators as “monsters,” you will convince yourself that they are rare, and you will not be as vigilant as you need to be.

Surprise!:

Legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno clashed repeatedly with the university’s former chief disciplinarian over how harshly to punish players who got into trouble, internal emails suggest, shedding new light on the school’s effort to balance its reputation as a magnet for scholar-athletes with the demands of running a nationally dominant football program.

In an Aug. 12, 2005, email to Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier and others, Vicky Triponey, the university’s standards and conduct officer, complained that Mr. Paterno believed she should have “no interest, (or business) holding our football players accountable to our community standards. The Coach is insistent he knows best how to discipline his players…and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern…and I think he was saying we should treat football players different from other students in this regard.”

The confrontations came to a head in 2007, according to one former school official, when six football players were charged by police for forcing their way into a campus apartment that April and beating up several students, one of them severely. That September, following a tense meeting with Mr. Paterno over the case, she resigned her post, saying at the time she left because of “philosophical differences.”

But wait, I thought JoePa was all about character, and insisting on his students being fine young men of character. Dr. Triponey wrote in an e-mail back then:

“Coach Paterno would rather we NOT inform the public when a football player is found responsible for committing a serious violation of the law and/or our student code despite any moral or legal obligation to do so.”

If this is true, then this Penn State image was all b.s., a sham, a Potemkin village. Paterno was no different from any other coach. His team had the run of the campus. Happy Valley’s version of droit de seigneur. He deserves what he gets, Paterno. They all do. Let it all come down on them.

I’m about to have to duck away from the keyboard off and on this afternoon. The kitchen calls. Julie is flying back from Louisiana today, and I have to get started on our Thanksgiving dinner prep.

I’m going to dry-rub the turkey with the Bavarian seasoning mixture from Penzey’s, which we usually use for pork but which is good on poultry too, methinks. It has crushed brown mustard seeds, rosemary, garlic, thyme, bay leaves, and sage. He’ll sit overnight. Then this afternoon, I’m going to make this ancho sweet potato puree (we have no anchos, but we do have a number of chipotles, which’ll do). Next, the cranberry sauce — I’m a hard-liner on homemade cranberry sauce; I put lemon zest in mine, too. And the cornbread dressing, the recipe for which is right here. I’ve never had better. Bourbon and bacon make the difference.

I’ll also do the sous-cheffing for the sauteed green beans. Our guests are bringing red cabbage salad and pecan pie. I bought a little creme fraiche yesterday in case I feel like baking a few of the last of our Pennsylvania apples. Julie is also making Dorie Greenspan’s Pumpkin Stuffed With Everything Good.  You want to know how good this is? Just look at the ingredient list:

• 1 pumpkin, about 3 pounds
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1/4 pound stale bread, thinly sliced and cut into 1/2-inch chunks
• 1/4 pound cheese, such as Gruyère, Emmenthal, cheddar, or a combination, cut into 1/2-inch chunks
• 2–4 garlic cloves (to taste), split, germ removed, and coarsely chopped
• 4 slices bacon, cooked until crisp, drained, and chopped (my addition)
• About 1/4 cup snipped fresh chives or sliced scallions (my addition)
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme (my addition)
• About 1/3 cup heavy cream
• Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

The pumpkin is only for being the container for the fondue. Cheese, bread, bacon, garlic, bacon, herbs, cream, nutmeg. I mean, come on! What’s not to love? We did this last Christmas, and it was a knockout, and hugely popular.

To drink, Riesling is standard, but we’re out of white here, and I didn’t want to restock before the move. Besides, we have two really nice bottles of Beaune, the last of our stash. It’s light, and will do; besides, we all prefer red wine. We do have a nice bottle of super-dry pink French Champagne to toast our last holiday in Philly. So, there we are.

What are you cooking for Thanksgiving? Open thread. (And before you say it, yes, we Orthodox have a dispensation from the fast for Thanksgiving.)

UPDATE: The Pumpkin Stuffed With Everything Good just came out of the oven: