clanforum
General Category => NEW MEMBERS! Introduce yourselves here! => Topic started by: Thomas B. Thompson on December 18, 2008, 02:54:05 PM
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I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!!
Looking forward to meeting new members at the AGM and seeing the old ones.
As the new year approches, I see it as an opportunity to grow and continue
the quest for our clan's goals. An atribute of a strong family is good communications,
so let's continue communicating with each other by means available: Forum, E-mails.
Phones, whatever ,to ensure to everyone that as clan family we are there for
each other.
Best Wishes to all
Tom/Barbara (Indiana)
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, glad to be part of the family!
Duke, Alison, & Taylor (Florida)
P.S. If you have not read the Scottish version of the story of Mary and Joseph that Stu posted in I think the poetry section, take a look!!!
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Hey Y'all,
My wish for you and yours is a Christmas filled with family, friends, and lots of chocolate and a New Year full of Blessings. :-*
Donna
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And Merry Christmas greetings from the mountaintop in Tennessee!
We've had a great year of building our Thom(p)son family and much to be proud of! We're a long way from our ultimate goal for our society, but some
milestones just take time and/or money.......we'll get there!
May your holidays be safe, warm and wonderful.
Tom and Mary
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Hoping you and your family have the best of times this holiday season! Merry Christmas and a Happy Hogmany! Don't overdue the cheer the weather may be bad and who knows what fools are out and about this time of year.
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MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY and SAFE NEW YEAR TO ALL!
Barbara
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Barbara........I think you're an over-achiever!!! :D Christmas colors and all!
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Well.....seems I forgot the green. ::) ;D
Barbara
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Happy Hogmanay
'Lang may yer lum reek' - ('Long may your chimney smoke')
If you're "First Footing" don't forget your gifts -
The first-foot is expected to bring suitable gifts to ensure good luck throughout the year. These may include:
• A lump of coal - for warmth.
• Cake or biscuits - to ensure the household never goes hungry. The cake is often a very rich and moist fruit cake known as Black Bun.
• Salt - to bring wealth.
in exchange your host might give you a wee glass of scotch whiskey
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Happy Hogmanay
'Lang may yer lum reek' - ('Long may your chimney smoke')
If you're "First Footing" don't forget your gifts -
The first-foot is expected to bring suitable gifts to ensure good luck throughout the year. These may include:
• A lump of coal - for warmth.
• Cake or biscuits - to ensure the household never goes hungry. The cake is often a very rich and moist fruit cake known as Black Bun.
• Salt - to bring wealth.
in exchange your host might give you a wee glass of scotch whiskey
Its been many years since I heard :lum reek" and "first foot"
My mother was born in Scotland in 1902 her mother in 1879 her family moved to NJ in 1911
I was born in 1940 , my grandmother until the day she died in 1974 sounded like she never left Scotland
Of course they were Thomson's
Happy Hogmanay to all
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OK - ignorance abounds here.........what is 'first footing?' and how do you know if you are the first-foot???? I don't want to 'set a foot wrong' (snark, snark........yeah, I know - no rotten tomatoes please!)
Wonder how lump of coal went from bringing warmth in Scottish to being given to naughty children over here?!?
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If my old memory don't fail.
First foot is the first person to enter house after midnight on New Year's eve.
We used to have some one leave the house prior to midnight and then enter with the prescribed items so as to ensure good luck to household.
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G'day and Merry Christmas to all our American cousins.
I thought it may interest those family members who have never been down under to hear how we spend this most Holy of days without snow or cold or sleet.
Remember we are approximately 16 hours ahead of you guys so we get to greet the jolly old fellow first which means we get our presents first. yuk yuk yuk.
Christmas Eve sees most people participating in Carols by Candlelight and many attend midnight mass. Then it's time to get to bed so the old bloke can ride his sleigh across the stars of the Southern Cross .
Due to the heat Santa arrives slightly differently than in the Northern hemisphere.
Santa is dressed in a broad brimmed hat with UV sunglasses, a red singlet, red & white board shorts and a pair of red thongs to protect his feet.
His transport has also been adapted to our climate and instead of reindeer, who have trouble with the heat, the sleigh is drawn by six white Boomers (kangaroo).
Chimneys are rare so Santa enters Aussie homes via pure magic.
Everyone is asleep when he arrives or are supposed to be but a mate of mine told me he stayed up one year and sprung his Mum having a pash with Santa under the mistle toe. I myself never believed him.
Christmas morning sees everyone up early to gather round the tree and receive their presents then the adults all sit down for a champagne and OJ breakfast while the kids wreck the place and rush off to their mates place to compare presents.
The rest of the morning is spent preparing the lunch, the ladies that is, and the blokes test out their new toys with a shot or two of Bundy Rum or whatever comes to hand.
The big lunch is also somewhat different than in the North though there are still some traditionalists that swealter with a hot European type meal. Most of us drag out the Bar-B-Que and the fun begins for the blokes. On the hot plate goes seafood by the score, Barrumundi, Schnapper, Moreton Bay Bugs (like a small but sweeter lobster), Mud Crabs, and of course no B-B-Q would be complete without KING PRAWNS (shrimp-very large ones). This is then served with various salads, cold meats, tropical fruit, christmas pudding with custard, and of course copious amounts of Christmas Cheer.
This is then followed by the traditional afternoon nap befor driving home to recover and prepare for Hogmanay.
This year the tempersature will be somewhere between 90-100 deg F and Cheryl and I will be on our own for the first time so have decided to go to Mt Tambourine for a catered affair and sleepover at one of the Chalets before attempting to drive back down the mountain.
I'm sure we'll have a fabulous time and We hope and pray that all our family in the North, that means you, all have the same.
MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HOGMANAY
Your Aussie Cousins
Ern & Cheryl Thompson
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Now lets all get drunk and fall in the snow ;D
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Good idea Graham.
Just send us some snow.
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
I hope everyone has a safe holiday and gets all kinds of goodies! Thank you for the Aussie info Ernest, very interesting. Heres greetings from my family to yours, wish I could say it in Gaelic, but am a rookie at it. Maybe we'll get good news this year from Lord Lyon, heres hoping!
yours in family abd spirit!
Bev
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Ern, I like your celebration of Christmas! Makes more sense for the men to slave over the Bar-B-Q instead of the women slaving over a hot stove in the kitchen.... ;D Thanks for sharing that with us. Hope you and Cheryl had a lovely Christmas.
Barbara
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Mary, about "First Footing"....."First footing" (or the "first foot" in the house after midnight) is still common across Scotland. To ensure good luck for the house the first foot should be a dark male, and he should bring with him symbolic pieces of coal, shortbread, salt, black bun and a wee dram of whisky. The dark male bit is believed to be a throwback to the Viking days, when a big blonde stranger arriving on your door step with a big axe meant big trouble, and probably not a very happy New Year!
My email friend in Scotland told me they don't celebrate Christmas as much as we do, but they really celebrate the New Year, like for a week. Then it takes that long again to sober up. ;D
I think the reason for Scots not celebrating Christmas is because it was virtually banned in Scotland for around 400 years, from the end of the 17th century to the 1950s. The reason for this dates back to the years of Protestant Reformation, when the straight-laced Kirk proclaimed Christmas as a Popish or Catholic feast, and as such needed banning.
Happy Hogmanay to all!
Barbara
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Well, a dark male with shortbread, good whisky, etc. or a big blonde with an axe...they both sound good to me!
Happy New Year Everyone!
Donna
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Hi all -
Back from the Indiana 'house of pestilence.' ;) We went to Ted and Pam Herring's for Christmas ..... Ted already had a cold (which we knew) but while we were there, Pam went down with it too. We figured we were doomed and she certainly was in no shape to worry about company, so we packed up and came home on Friday. I did get their cold (flu?) by Saturday, but not as severe as they had. Tom got it a day or so later - again, lighter. So, our plans for Christmas vacation didn't work out quite as planned, but.....hey! We're retired! We can head that far north just about any time, so when the weather gets better (we drove both directions in rain) and everyone's healthy, we'll hi-ho our way back up for another long weekend.
We did have a great Christmas day - lots of laughs, dinner with more members of the family, fun gifts, playing with Ted's new Wii (that baseball game could land you in therapy for shoulder dislocation from pitching!) and a bit of bridge.
Hope you all fared well over the holidays - the worst thing was that I forgot to bring home the sausage balls and Ted ate them all! And GLOATED over it! :'(
I think New Year's Eve will probably be us warming our bums in front of the fireplace and toasting the start of another (better?) year. We wish you all the same good start!
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First Foot
I had it covered left stuff outside, then after midnight brought in the shortbread and Dewers,
No coal here in Florida (should have used some grill charcoal.
Hair is still partly dark.
I had went to Cameron's British Foods in Cape Coral on the 31st.
I bought some Scottish pies both meat and pork, also some shortbread and a box of scone mix.
John
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Sounds like you've covered most of the requirements......come up for the AGM and we'll send you back with some TN coal!
We toasted with Robitussin! ;D
Happy New Year!
Mary and Tom
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Hey Mary & Tom,
I sure hope you're feeling better!
Did you notice that the Forum has a new member for 2009 already?
It's been rather slow on the Forum and this would be a wonderful time for some of our "Shy" members to introduce themselves! Just a couple lines to let us know who you are and what part of the country you're from! PLEASE :-*
Donna
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Hi Donna -
Still not 'well' but somewhat better. This flu really hangs on!
I wish you well getting people to post.......I haven't had any luck! Stu tried stirring the pot too...... Can't seem to get them to understand this isn't just a READING forum - to have any good stuff TO read, people have to post what they have/find so others can comment, add to it, question, etc. It simply can't rely on a handful of people to keep doing the research and posting! I look at the stats on how many people are online reading it and it's incredible..........but they don't post. I guess they think they don't have anything interesting??? How about your genealogy dead ends? Where did your Thompsons emigrate from (Scotland, Ireland, etc. and what port?) and where did they land in US? All kinds of things could help someone else's research. But this requires participation - not sit back and let others do it.
I'm working on other things at the moment (website and 501c3 foremost) and just don't have time to do much posting now. You know, if there's no mandate for a forum, we can always drop it.
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Mary, glad to hear you're feeling a little better and hope you complete your recovery real soon!
Welcome to the madhouse to BillT!
Donna, now that the holidays are over hopefully things will pick up a bit around here. I went North to see the grandkids in Maine and had a total of 17 days away from work so I had a bit of catching up to do and that has kept me off the forum except for brief check-ins to see if there was anything major going on.
Truthfully, I don't understand why most folks seem content to sit back and let someone else do all the work. That's how you end up with a few people dominating the group and then you start getting complaints about people being left out of what's going on. I don't know but I'm sure everyone has something to say about something that's important to them and might be to the Clan if someone is willing to bring up the subject. Anyways, I'll try to back on the stick and start posting again.
Happy New Year to all and may 2009 be the Year of the Clan Thompson!