PICNIC~or how we spent holidays w a BIG family!

Happy Memorial Day! I realize that it is the day to support all veterans and honor those fallen soldiers. And I do! But for me all I remember on that day as a child and teen growing up in a large family of 11 children were the never ending picnics. Our Clancy family being so large that to get even this many into a photo was a miracle. I am in neither and was off somewhere. However you can see the large can of Van de Camps beans, lemonade cooler, large pan of frosted chocolate cake(this is where everyone looks like they are behaving because my dad would tease us as to who would get the cake first.
My parents never spared us the fun of being a normal and real family. We went on picnics and played outdoors with relatives and friends and always found something to do.
I drove to Flagstaff yesterday with Rita for an outing, but why I picked a holiday to go there I will never know. There is a place in the middle of the trip called Slide Rock which has a rushing river that people love to swim at and the traffic was an hour wait on the way back inching our way back to Sedona. Nothing to do but wait. We even dialed in the AM radio to see if we could find a weird show to listen to . Nothing on the waves yesterday.
Back to picnic. I want to add here a little history. You can read it if you like or not but its always nice at a party or gathering to be able to spout off a little "fact fun" to keep people aware and amaze onlookers. So here it is and have a wonderful holiday. Stay out of traffic if possible.

"The first usage of the word is traced to the 1692 edition of Origines de la Langue Française de Ménage—which mentions 'pique-nique' as being of recent origin; it marks the first appearance of the word in print. The term was used to describe a group of people dining in a restaurant who brought their own wine. For long a picnic retained the connotation of a meal to which everyone contributed something. Whether picnic is actually based on the verb piquer which means 'pick' or 'peck' with the rhyming nique meaning "thing of little importance" is doubted; the Oxford English Dictionary says it is of unknown provenance.

The word picnic first appeared in English texts in 1748 (OED), and may have entered the English language from this French word or from the German Picknick, which may simply be a parallel borrowing from French pique-nique. The practice of an elegant meal eaten out-of-doors, rather than a harvester worker's dinner in the harvest field, was connected with respite from hunting from the Middle Ages; the excuse for the pleasurable outing of 1723 in Lemoyne's painting (illustration, left) is still offered in the context of a hunt."