Everyone has a list of family and close friends that they feel the need to make an effort to visit every decade or so.
If you’re like me and your entire extended family lives outside the Yukon, they may be making an extra effort to come and see you, because (though geographically cumbersome) the Yukon is pretty cool place to come visit.
Part of my extended family recently came up to stay with us. Though my parents, siblings and I were not to able to quite recreate the Yukonic tour William and Kate received, hopefully we were able to showcase the Yukon’s best features.
Everyone knows the real grunt work comes before the guests arrive. If your family is anything like mine, the house will undergo a ritual massive cleaning from top to bottom.
It’ll be a family team effort of approximately five hours combined, with the vacuum whirring in the background and washing machine roaring with a full load.
You breakout that tub of cleaning chemicals to finally deal with that stain you made on the carpet last month and squirt everything with the cleaning solution that somehow makes it shiny.
It all builds up towards that first impression moment, when your guests walk into the pristine house. Their gaze will land on the coffee table lined with selectively chosen books that you never read, but simply give the impression that “I’m absolutely someone who spends my Sunday morning leafing through collections of The Best Landscape Photography of Western Canada.”
The dining room table is elegantly strewn with pinecones and other pieces of miscellaneous nature and shrubbery. A scene that Martha Stewart decided would look good on a dinner table and that the rest of the world just went along with.
There are floating candles and candles that smell like honey. The good plates that we never use are hauled out of the back corners of the back cupboards and are all set and laid out with fancy napkins.
If a room could have a facial expression, this one would have a raised arched eyebrow with an expression reading, “Oh, you mean everyone’s dinner table doesn’t look like this?”
When your guests eventually walk through the door and run their fingers across the railing without a spec of dust coming off, they’ll finally utter that ever so longed for comment, “Oh wow, the place looks great!”
To which your mother will secretly take great delight in replying, “Oh thanks, it’s an absolute mess. Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to clean much. Come in, come in.”
They come in and you’ll talk about old times, catch up on new times and rave over Air North together.
You’ll layout the following weekend plans. Some of which, will start and stop at the ends of Main Street, for our visitors who don’t particularly enjoy the outdoors and more so came to the Yukon for the postcard and to check off some personal bucket list items.
But for others, hikes, hikes and more hikes will be enough for them until the snow sets in. Combine that with some Midnight Sun coffee, a beautiful sunset and the cold weather fulfilling your guests need to justify owning a down jacket they bought on clearance down south, they’ll have a great trip!
