Fall Traditions

The weather here has been cool and crisp lately. It is beginning to feel like the Fall season it is. There are other tell-tale signs – football is on and there is talk of the nearing college “Bowl Season,” the leaves on the trees, while still green are beginning to look a bit yellowish around the edges – death cannot be too many more months off for them.

I love the Fall. It has such a distinct flavor about it. Change is in the air – and I don’t mean anything doing with elections or politics. It is a time when people slow down and start doing little fun things like decorating the front porch with hay bales, pumpkins and scarecrows. There are all sorts of festivals this time of year. It seems as if every little town has a Harvest Festival or crowning of the Pecan Queen or some such event.

Some people like to “watch the leaves change.” Around here we have to travel to see that happen if we are interested in any change besides green to brown – we miss out on the green to orange to red to yellow spectacular known to most everyone north of Dallas. (But we know the luxury of not living in snow 6 months of the year, so there is that trade off.)

In my family, we had a fun Fall tradition when I was little. We had several pecan trees in our backyard and it seems that they shed their pecans each Fall (thus the apparent timing of the crowning of the Pecan Queens). During halftime of Houston Oiler’s games on TV my parents would send my older brother and me out into the backyard with large brown grocery sacks and see who could collect the most pecans.

I remember being bundled up against the cold and running around the yard in some sort of November Easter-Egg style pecan hunt/competition. My brother and I would scour the yard for those green egg shaped nuggets. And the funny thing is most of the time mom and dad didn’t alert us as to when the game came back on and halftime was over. They left us out there until we unwittingly cleared the yard of each and every nut we could find – all in a supposed effort to see which one of us was the better hunter-gatherer.

When we came back we measured the sacks to see who won and of course, there was the requisite crowing from the victor. But then came the real deal, while we could eat some of them most of them were set aside – we had this fancy cool pecan nut cracker that really looked like an atom smasher and these little picks to get all the pieces out of the shells (People today are so lazy and miss all that fun when they buy them already shelled.)

The real deal was that the pecans were Christmas gifts to family friends. We had to put them in these bright colored paper bags and tie yarn around them to give out to people for Christmas. (How long ago was this? Who hunts and gathers gifts from their yard anymore? I think I’m bringing this tradition back this year.) This was no “contest” between my brother and me. This was A) a way to get us out of the house for an hour and B) get the pecans picked up so my parents didn’t have to do it themselves. What a rip off!

Bait and switch, a ruse, trickery, deceit, manipulative parenting! Maybe a little. But it was “for our own good.”

In point of fact, we had fun out there. Even if we thought we were out there for one reason and we were really out there for a different one my brother and I still had fun. We still made a game of it and we did get to smash and eat some of the spoils, err, Christmas gifts. Would we have done it if mom and dad had said “Here take this sack and go pick up all the pecans in the yard so we can give them to friends?” Probably, but only after protesting and only because they were our parents – and I know I would have done it reeeally slowly and with a lot of heavy sighing.

God does that to me too sometimes. I think He has me doing something for one reason and later, after I’m done I look back and realize it was for a totally different purpose. He knows me very well. If He were to tell me “I’m going to teach you a lesson now” I would be like, “No way.” And there would be lots of heavy sighing. But, if He says “Hey, would you like to go on a little hike to a beautiful waterfall?” I say, “Sure!” It’s what He shows me on the nearly impossible 11 hour, 14 mile hike that I wasn’t expecting that’s the gift and the lessons I will never forget.

Bait and switch is a game as old as eternity. But it can sometimes be good to play. Just be careful if you are asked to join a competition to gather pecans at halftime – someone’s getting them for Christmas.