Holiday season, 2022-23

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and a happy new year--Bragg Family South certainly did!  The picture of the kids (and Bella, our cantankerous tabby) actually was taken just a few days back, right before Kenny returned to Michigan Tech to start his next semester.

As always, we had a busy holiday season, full of music and events--such as the Monticello Christmas parade, pictured below (Stephen's high school marching band was in this parade, but I didn't get a good picture of him):

We also helped with an educational/cultural program hosted by Preserve Arkansas (they are a statewide non-profit focused on preserving the cultural history of Arkansas), which was hosting a "Behind the Big House" program to recognize some of the contributions of the enslaved persons and their descendent communities who helped to build, maintain, and work behind the scenes of some of the big plantations operations in this state (see their webpage on this program for more details).  This event was held at the Taylor House, part of the antebellum Hollywood or Valley Plantation operation in the eastern part of the county we live in (I've posted some of our work out here before).  Besides helping get some parts cleaned up behind the scenes, Hope and I played a pretty low-key role of tending the fire one windy evening:

Actually, the fire played a bit more of a role than keeping people warm; this program hosted a husband/wife team from Natchez, Mississippi, who came up to speak to participants of the day-long program on foodways and African-American food traditions in this region.  Chef Jarita Frazier-King (with the red bandana below) and her husband (Roderick, I believe)  of the Natchez Heritage School of Cooking put together an amazing set of dishes kept warm by the fire, and then explained some of the significance of this cuisine:

The following day had a morning-long program by several Arkansas historians (including UAM Station Archeologist Matthew Rooney) on the history and role of African-American women locally and across the state:

For work, I traveled to Asheville, North Carolina for a week-long leadership team meeting which, although soggy from the rains, went well.  I took some pictures on our field trips, but rather than showing you more trees, I decided to share this interesting sculpture of an octopus and some rabbits from the Atlanta airport:

You'll have to ask the artist about the meaning of this piece!  I was glad my return trip from North Carolina went smoothly, because the evening I arrived back in Little Rock we attended a concert that we had longed to see--the Trans-Siberian Orchestra!  What a spectacle of lights and music:

Even from our nose-bleed seats it was impossible to not be impressed by this performance--a must see for those who can appreciate their holiday season approach!  This concert was certainly not our only holiday music performance--the very next day, Stephen played with regional band concert in Magnolia, Arkansas.  He actually hadn't joined us for the TSO concert the night before, because he was practicing with his new bandmates...  The picture below is of Stephen (blue shirt with the shaggy face in the middle) prior to the concert starting--his position in the band kept me from getting a picture of him playing:

And then there were the holiday get-togethers, such as the one Hope and I did with her co-workers in Little Rock, at a local distillery called "Rock Town":

We got a formal tour of their small but interesting operation.  Pictured below, our tour guide describes how they ferment a number of grains into a beer-like liquid (vats in the foreground) before it is distilled into whatever spirit they are making at the time (using the copper still in the background):

Right before we left to come up to Wisconsin, we caught the Christmas performance of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, which was spectacular:

On our way through southern Wisconsin, we stopped briefly for gas, dinner, and a little shopping, with a guest appearance by my brother Bob:

It was a wonderfully white Christmas week in northern Wisconsin, with freshly fallen snow on the ground, and more that fell while we were there:

We were able to spend some time visiting with my brother John in Rhinelander.  John had flown in a couple days before we arrived.  John and I took several walks to enjoy the snow:

It was bracingly cold during this part of the visit, with nighttime lows dropping below -10...including the last day of John's visit, which made for a cold walk that morning:

Towards the end of the Rhinelander part of our visit, the entire midwest got a wallop of snow, wind, and cold, which meant more snow removal effort by dad and myself:

and more lovely tree pictures:

We ended up delaying our drive to visit Hope's dad in the Ann Arbor area a day due to the road conditions.  We arrived by the evening of Christmas after a rather uneventful drive (well, if you don't count those couple hours of snow covered roads in Lower Michigan!).  We got to enjoy some of the great food scene in the Ann Arbor area, including a great little Moroccan restaurant in a former Taco Bell: 

Rick Pruden's cat confiscated one of Beth's gift boxes for a higher purpose:

Our main event in our Michigan part of the visit was a trip to snow Grand Rapids, Michigan (about 3 hours west of Ann Arbor) to watch Kenny play in the Michigan Tech pep band...  If you look very closely, you can see him playing behind the guy with the lit-up hat below:

Michigan Tech's men's hockey team was playing in the Great Lakes Invitation tournament that weekend...and although the did poorly the game we watched, they won the next day, and thus finished third.  Even in a blowout loss, the hockey was fun to watch:

We weren't always on the road--we had some slow time with video games and sleeping cats on this trip:

We also got to see the progress they've been making on the new bridge between Canada and the US, being installed just below downtown Detroit:

Here's most of us with Rick Pruden (Stephen stayed in the car) checking out the Detroit River, looking north towards downtown Detroit and the Ambassador Bridge:

Our returned trip proved safe and uneventful (which was good).  Kenny came back to Arkansas with us to get his driver's license updated and get some things done on our minivan, which we've lent him this school year.  He left to return to MTU a couple days ago, and arrived safely back in Houghton yesterday.

Now, back to the work and school grind!