Thanksgiving and a Family Photo Shoot!

To begin with…

We’re wishing everyone a Very Merry Christmas!

We won’t have any family around for Christmas this year, so I decided to revisit our 2017 Thanksgiving Holiday with our family in Omaha Nebraska… Following first, some quality time spent with Laurie’s family and old some friends in St. Louis. 
On Wednesday we drove on up to Nebraska for the big day!

Shortly after our arrival in Omaha, we took this photo of our oldest grandson and my namesake, David III.  He’s grown up a bit, standing about 6’ 3” and he’s a junior in high school this year!  Time does fly…

Whereas David III’s younger brother, Emmett Lee, is into basketball and especially football, David III is more like yours truly in the sense that sports aren’t a big deal to him.  Instead, he’s a debate pro, recently winning a regional completion against his peers as well as seniors in high school.

Laurie and I decided that we should take a photo with David III while we had the chance.  Between his buddies and his girlfriend named Ryanna, his prime time for adults (parents and grandparents included) is a bit ‘limited’!  He did better than we expected though…given his age and expanding interests…

Whenever we are with David II, Amy and our grandsons for Thanksgiving, I have the turkey carving duty.  After dinner, I am also responsible for stripping all of the remaining meat from the carcass…  No one, especially Amy, will watch me as I perform my messy, some say gross, après feast task!  

Laurie took this photo of our group seated at the table.  David II is in the kitchen in the upper center of the picture.  From the left, Grandma/RuRu Dianne, yours truly, Amy, Emmett Lee, Amy’s sister Shelby, Shelby’s son Dalton next to David III.

Here’s another view of our Thanksgiving gathering… David II is seated at the head of the table.  In addition to the turkey, our feast consisted of bakery bread, beet salad, mashed potatoes, terrific gravy, sweet potato casserole, sage stuffing, cranberry sauce, macaroni and cheese plus a cheesy zucchini casserole.   

Amy and David made one big change in this year’s celebration.  In the past, we’d always noshed on a plethora of appetizers and snacks, followed by the Thanksgiving feast later in the day.  This time they skipped the pre-dinner food…and we all agreed that the dinner itself was much more enjoyed and appreciated!

Amy loves to take photos and she’s always looking for a promising site as a backdrop.  This year she chose this old grain elevator a block or two from historic downtown Elkhorn Nebraska.  It was built ca. 1915. 

At one point in time, Elkhorn area farmers shipped significant amounts of wheat and corn, much of it to army posts to the west.  Other items shipped during the early days included barley, furs and buffalo hides…

With the grain elevator as our backdrop, David II took this photo of me, Emmett Lee, Laurie and David III.  It looks like Emmett (14) will be taller than I am by the time he’s 15!

The town of Elkhorn Nebraska was founded in 1865 and it was an independent municipality until it was annexed by the city of Omaha in 2005… In an attempt to prevent the annexation, Elkhorn almost simultaneously annexed several surrounding subdivisions in an attempt to prevent Omaha’s annexation efforts.  Under state law, if the city had had a population above 10,000 citizens, annexation by Omaha would have been avoided.

Ahhh…the sweethearts posing for a photo!  We’re coming up on our 39^th wedding anniversary in April of 2018 and we still like each other…

Amy took lots of photos and I took photos of her taking photos!  Here she’s posed her nephew Dalton and she’s doing her thing… FYI, her photos are almost always better than mine but I know that she couldn’t compete with me on this one!

This is Dalton with his mother and Amy’s sister, Shelby… Dalton is a senior in high school this year.  Shelby and Dalton drove over to Omaha from Indianapolis for our Thanksgiving family gathering.

FYI…Apparently this grain elevator is a very popular place to take photos.  I found a bunch of different family photos on Facebook that were taken at this location!  

Here is Amy taking another photo of Dalton, this time on the front porch of one of Elkhorn’s historic buildings across from the grain elevator.  I’m sure that this structure dates back to the late 1800s…

Here’s another photo of the previous building.  I was unable to determine when it was built.  I’d assumed that it was an old mercantile store of some type…with large sliding barn doors along the rear portion of the structure.  However, I did find a photo of this building on an historic Elkhorn NE Facebook site.  At one time this was the Farmer Home Hotel and a beer sign was affixed to the nearest post supporting the porch roof.

I couldn’t find any information dating this building either.  I did learn that one of the brothers who founded the Housley Brothers Rental Properties Company back in 1983 died at a young age this past July.  He was a 5^th generation Elkhorn resident…

I was also able to determine this building had, at various times, been occupied by the Hansen Meat Market, Bruhn Slaughter House and Jeanette’s Beauty Shop.

I did a little better with this building.  The State Bank of Elkhorn was built in MCMXVI (1916).  An attempted robbery in 1927 resulted in the shooting death of the bank’s president.  The bank closed forever following the 1934 “Bank Holiday” during the Great Depression.

Two days after taking office in 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a ‘Bank Holiday” and for 5 days, all banking transactions across the USA were suspended except for making change.  During this banking hiatus, Congress enacted the Emergency Banking Act which allowed the President, through the Treasury Department, to reopen banks that were solvent and assist those that were not.  As a result, only 61 banks failed that year…but apparently this was one of them.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit and once again...

Merry Christmas!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave and Laurie