Happy Thanksgiving!

After the world ends, notebooks and documenting will be vital. Without a computer, phone and the Interwebs to write down my exploits, I will be taking my horse down to the Barnes and Nobles (it will be a two-day trip) to scavenge notebooks. Fancy ones. Moleskins. With the rubber band strap that keeps it closed.

I will make sure I write down the dates and continue a calendar and remember the year. It will become important in keeping me grounded, since modern society will be torn from its comfort zone. I am surrounded by date and time at all corners of my world, even the corners I don't visit as often that are littered with dust bunnies -- you can tell what time it is over there, too.

But when the world ends, we can't let time end too, nor the calendar. Within those little squares are special days, birthdays and anniversaries that will need to be celebrated -- because living after the end of the world is going to be bleak. And sad.

Or, as they are saying in the U.K., Oxford Dictionary's word of the year British-style: We will be living in omnishambles.

The little squares that we used to fill in on the wall calendar, or we fingered in to our Google calendar, are going to be vital. Those days will help keep us going. Since the light at the end of the tunnel will have been extinguished, those little days we celebrate will be the light within the tunnel of our new existence, and it's going to be a dark tunnel.

Like Thanksgiving. We will need to continue celebrating it on the fourth Thursday of November.

Will there be turkey? Maybe for some (I'm thinking of you, ancestors of Ben Franklin!). Will there be cranberry sauce? Not from the can -- the only true way to eat it, ridges and all. There might be a mixed salad of wild greens punctuated with crunch from roasted acorns. There could be a deer roasting on a spit over a smokey fire sweetened by wild berries that aren't poisonous -- we figured out which ones were poisonous because of Fred.

You know, the village idiot of our small band of followers and family who was raving mad one afternoon about not having enough food rationed to him? He took that handful of those red berries and squashed them into his mouth. His last few minutes were not pretty. We really know not to eat those berries now.

But we also had a field guide, and Fred was too lazy to read.

Besides Fred, it's the holidays, birthdays and anniversaries that are going to be vital in finding small amounts of joy after the end of the world. That's why I need to keep the calendar going. I may not get to eat any pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese icing on Thanksgiving, but I will be able to sit around an open fire with the people that are important to me and know that, even if the world has ended, we are being resourceful, healthy and making it work.