WASHINGTON - Thanksgiving is over, President Barack Obama has pardoned one turkey (and eaten another), and now a giant Christmas tree has arrived at the White House.

Like it or not, Christmas is here.

First Lady Michelle Obama — with daughters Sasha and Malia — kicked off her traditional almost-December duties on Friday by accepting delivery of a 18 1/2 foot tall, 12 foot wide tree, which will be displayed in the White House Blue Room.

Reporters and a small group of guests gathered to watch the tree be pulled on a horse-drawn carriage down a White House driveway to the strains of ”Oh Christmas Tree” being played by a military band.

Except for exchanging a few pleasantries, Mrs. Obama did not speak to the press. Would she comment on the couple who apparently crashed her big state dinner on Wednesday? Not so much.

The huge tree, a Douglas fir, came from a Christmas tree farm run by an elderly West Virgina couple who won the “National Christmas Tree Contest” for a record fourth time, the White House said.

Lest environmentalists be concerned, the White House put out a statement with some heartening details: “Real Christmas Trees are a renewable, recyclable agricultural product.”

That’s a relief. So … what about turkeys?

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Photo credits: The 2009 White House Christmas Tree arrives by horse-drawn cart at the White House in Washington and U.S. first lady Michelle Obama is pictured with her daughters Malia (R) and Sasha as she is presented with the 2009 White House Christmas Tree at the White House in Washington, November 27, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed

The First Family swooped in for a swift spot of volunteering Wednesday at Martha’s Table, about two miles from the White House, handing out turkeys and groceries to a fast-moving line of the local needy.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, first lady Michelle warmly greeted people and handed them bags of fresh vegetables - she’s big on eating right - while leaning over to gently pinch the face of her youngest daughter, Sasha.

The eight-year-old was busy in the turkey stuffing department next to dad, President Barack Obama. Clad in a black zip-up jacket and open necked white shirt, Obama greeting people with a hearty “Happy Thanksgiving, How Are You,” as he flashed wide smiles and industriously slipped pumpkin pies into food bags while simultaneously shaking hands. Eldest daughter Malia, 11, standing next to her mother, also seemed to be having a good time as she distributed packets of food.

The Obamas were joined by a dozen or so family and friends,  in town to share Thanksgiving with them at the White House, including Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson, as well as the president’s half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and brother-in-law Konrad Ng.

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(Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obamas hand out food on day before Thanksgiving in Washington DC Nov. 25, 2009))

President Barack Obama walked in the rain among the graves of U.S. casualties from the Iraq and Afghan wars at Arlington National Cemetery and took an unscheduled detour into section 60, a thicket of simple white headstones, to mark Veterans Day.

Underscoring the poignancy of the visit, Obama was due to hold a war council later on Wednesday as he tries to decide whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, where U.S. forces experienced their bloodiest month in October.

The president, accompanied by first lady Michelle Obama, bent down briefly at the headstone of 19-year-old Specialist Ross McGinnis, who was awarded the United States’ highest military decoration for valor, the Medal of Honor.

McGinnis was killed when he threw himself onto a grenade during a patrol in Baghdad in  2006.

The first couple, bareheaded and ignoring the miserable weather, spoke and shook hands with visitors they found by the gravesides, one of whom Michelle Obama hugged.

The president, confronted by fading public support for the war, is expected to decide in coming weeks about boosting U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, even as he draws them down in Iraq.

His stop at a section of Arlington Cemetery in Virginia that is the burial ground for U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan followed the somber Veterans Day ceremony at which Obama acknowledged the cost of fighting in both places.

“In this time of war, we gather here mindful that the generation serving today already deserves a place alongside previous generations for the courage they have shown and the sacrifices that they have made,” he said.

More than 4,300 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq and some 900 in Afghanistan.

Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Obama in Arlington National Cemetery to mark Veterans Day)

The White House glowed pumpkin orange on Saturday when the Obama family turned 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into Halloween central, complete with a giant stuffed spider dangling from a web above its front door.

More than 2,000 local area children and their families were invited for the traditional trick-or-treat event.  

The Obamas spent about 30 minutes handing out cellophane bagfulls of boxed red, white and blue M&M’s. The boxes bore the presidential seal. Also tucked in was a home-baked orange-glazed cookie and, in a nod to Michelle Obama’s efforts to promote healthy food, dried apricots and cranberries.

The president didn’t wear a costume for his first Halloween in the White House. Michelle Obama went as a cat woman, complete with leopard-print top and furry ears on a headband. Daughters Malia and Sasha were there for the fun, but were not stuck with any candy line duties. 

The scene was worthy of a Hollywood extravaganza. Bubble machines blanketed the North Portico, the ceremonial entrance to the White House. Pumpkins, some carved and candle lighted, lined the marble steps. Behind Obama stood a white-helmeted storm trooper character from “Star Wars,” along with the film’s Chewbacca, the hairy, apelike “wookie.”  

 Entertainers from the Chicago-based Redmoon Theater and other companies wove their own thrills and chills for those in line. A brass band clad in skeleton suits belted out a free jazz-style funeral stomp. Outsized figures on stilts simulated moving trees. Women in butterfly suits maneuvered inflatable, 10-foot (3-meter) snow-globe-like spheres on the White House lawn.

To heighten the Halloween effect, the White House was flood-lit through orange filters. Giant pumpkins weighing as much as 1,000 pounds (450-kg) dotted the 18-acre (7-hectare) grounds.  And the big, black spider hung hauntingly between the tall white columns framing the front door.

After handing out the treats, the president welcomed the children of military families chosen by the armed services along with the kids of White House staff in the East Room.

Then Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, caught his eye. She was decked out as the Disney character Goofy. “Can people please not take a picture of my ambassador to the United Nations,” Obama joshed photographers gathered to one side. He fretted aloud that U.S. diplomatic efforts might be spooked by the sight of her.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Halloween at the White House)

“Are you ready to work really hard?”

“Are you ready to get dirty?”

That was the rallying cry from first lady Michelle Obama Thursday as she invited local school children to help her pick crops from the White House garden.

The crops are the bounty from the garden that Obama started in the spring to promote healthy eating .

And it’s frugal eating too.

“Do you know how much food has come out of this garden so far? Over 740 pounds of food have come out of this little piece of land,” Obama told the kids.  The whole thing — from start to harvest — came in under $200, she added.

Some of the youngsters at the harvest had been helping with the garden as it grew — along with Jim Adams, the chief horticulturist at the White House and the chefs at the executive mansion.

Everything harvested Thursday, including some gigantic sweet potatoes, was being donated to charity.

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Photo credit:Reuters/Larry Downing (Michelle Obama in the White House garden on the South Lawn)

President Barack Obama is letting it be known that he was not pleased with the way his trip to New York with wife Michelle last May became a political issue.

“Everything becomes political,” he told The New York Times Magazine in a story to be published this Sunday. “What I value most about my marriage is that it is separate and apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington, and Michelle is not part of that silliness.”

Republicans had criticized the trip as an expensive extravagance during hard economic times. Obama and Michelle flew Air Force One from Washington to New York for a night out on the town.

Obama told the magazine that the date-night flapdoodle was the one time that life in the White House annoyed him.

“If I weren’t president, I would be happy to catch the shuttle with my wife to take her to a Broadway show, as I had promised her during the campaign, and there would be no fuss and no muss and no photographers,” the president said.

“That would please me greatly.” He went on to say: “The notion that I just couldn’t take my wife out on a date without it being a political issue was not something I was happy with.”

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Obama and his wife Michelle return to Washington after visiting New York for dinner and a Broadway play in May)

The official portrait of the first family is in.

There’s Sasha, the youngest at 8 years old, casually draping her arm over the shoulder of the president of the United States.

Older sister Malia embraces her mom, first lady Michelle Obama, as they all sit for their first official first family portrait in the Green Room at the White House on Sept. 1.

It is the work of portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, known for some of the most famous celebrity photographs of our time — Demi Moore pregnant and nude on the cover of Vanity Fair, and a nude John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono for the cover of Rolling Stone taken on the day of Lennon’s death.

But back to the first family’s portrait. Hold on, isn’t someone missing? Where’s Bo, the first dog? Is he already in the dog house?

“Bo didn’t make the cut,” the first lady’s spokeswoman tells us with a laugh. “He was upstairs at home.”

Maybe he hasn’t learned to say cheese yet…

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Photo credit: White House photo of first family portrait, Reuters/Larry Downing photo of Bo

A genealogist working with The New York Times has traced Michelle Obama’s family tree back five generations to a 6-year-old slave girl named Melvinia who was valued at $475.

The White House said first lady Michelle Obama had not known many of the details of her family history and enjoyed reading it. She had declined to comment on the story for The New York Times because of the personal nature of the subject.

“I don’t believe she knew or had known all of this, but enjoyed reading about her family history,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

The slave girl Melvinia initially appears in the documentary record in 1850, the property of South Carolina landowner David Patterson, who owned 21 slaves.

After Patterson died in 1852, Melvinia was sent to a smaller 200-acre farm in Georgia, the home of Patterson’s daughter and son-in-law, Christianne and Henry Shields. She was one of only three slaves on the farm near Atlanta.

Sometime when she was a teenager, possibly as young as 15, Melvinia became pregnant by a white male. The father is unknown, possibly Henry Shields, then in his 40s, or one of his four sons, aged 19 to 24.

Melvinia gave birth around 1859 to a boy, Dolphus. She and the father of her first-born son are Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandparents, genealogist Megan Smolenyak says.

Three of Melvinia’s four children are listed on the 1870 census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, raising the possibility that the relationship with the original father continued even after the Civil War.

After being freed, she worked on a farm adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry Shields’ sons.

In her 30s or 40s, Melvinia reconnected with former slaves she had known as a child on the Patterson estate. She moved with the couple — Mariah and Bolus Easley — to a spot near the border with Alabama.

Dolphus married one of the Easleys’ daughters, Alice. The couple are Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandparents.

Melvinia, who took Shields as her last name, died in 1938 in her 90s.

Dolphus and Alice moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he was a co-founder of First Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Trinity Baptist Church.

Dolphus, a carpenter, thrived in Birmingham, but he split up with Alice. She moved around, working as a seamstress and a maid.

Their son, Robert Lee Shields, married Annie Lawson in 1906 and worked as a laborer and railroad porter. Robert Lee disappeared from the public record when he was about 32 years old.

He was Michelle Obama’s great-grandfather.

Robert Lee’s son, Purnell Shields, was the first lady’s grandfather, her mother Marian Robinson’s father. He moved to Chicago as part of the great migration north and worked as a painter.

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Photo credit:Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama family, including Michelle Obama’s mother Marian Robinson, on White House balcony April 13.)

So. What happened?

President Barack Obama dashed overnight to Copenhagen, waved the flag, praised everyone in sight, and came home with Nothing, Nada, Naught, Zero, Zip, Zilch (couldn’t find the Danish word or would have thrown that in too).

The Olympics Oracle, after much fumbling with the envelope, read the winner and Rio de Janeiro scooped up the 2016 Summer Games.

Chicago — the hometown for Obama, his wife, and close advisers like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel — was left out in the cold, not even making it to the T2 (Top Two).

Was it the unbridled enthusiasm in Rio for bringing home the Olympics, compared with the protesters from Chicago who didn’t want the games anywhere near their town?

“I think that the city of Chicago would have welcomed having the Olympics in 2016,” said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly, also a native of Chicago. “I don’t think this necessarily demonstrates that Chicago is not a welcoming place.”

Was it the warmer welcome from Brazil to international travelers, compared with the post-9/11 U.S. security consciousness?

“We recognize that we need to do more to make it easier for legitimate visa applicants to make it to the U.S. We understand we have an image problem about that process,” Kelly said.

Was it that the IOC liked the sound of  Duran Duran’s “Rio” and Tom Jobim’s “The Girl From Ipanema” rather than Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” or Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” ?

Did Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva outcharm Obama?

Now the question is whether the failure in Denmark will tarnish Obama’s image at home and abroad. What do you think? Should he have made the trip to Copenhagen at all? Is this a big failure or just a small bump?

Inevitably, Obama’s trip became fodder for Republican critics. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele: “While I am disappointed with the IOC’s decision, I look forward to the president returning stateside so that he can refocus his efforts on the growing unemployment crisis that was highlighted by today’s monthly jobs report.”

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Photo Credit: Reuters/pool (President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Chicago 2016 CEO Pat Ryan leave stage after presentation), Reuters/Sergio Moraes (surfer rides the waves in Rio), Reuters/Frank Polich (Lake Michigan in Chicago)

Olympics intrigue broke out in the middle of all the U.N., G20, world leader stuff with the rumor that perhaps President Barack Obama might go to Copenhagen after all to pitch his hometown Chicago as the site for the 2016 Summer Games.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs fanned the flames further when asked whether it was possible Obama may go. “Absolutely,” he told reporters on Air Force One headed to Pittsburgh for the G20.

In Washington speak that’s about as close to saying he’s going without announcing he’s going.

“I think it would be a very quick trip, yes,” Gibbs said.

So what happened since the announcement that First Lady Michelle Obama would be the one going to Copenhagen next week to push for Chicago against the competition: Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo?

We’re thinking perhaps the Chicago set at the White House — Michelle Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod — did a little pushing of their own….

It might also mean that healthcare legislation is moving at such a snail’s pace that there’s no need for the president to forego the trip.

The other breaking news is that one of the gifts for foreign dignitaries in Pittsburgh was actually made by some very buzzzy workers at the White House.

We discovered this nugget while reading this very important summit document: “The G20 Pittsburgh Summit Spousal Program Addendum.” Among the gifts to visiting G20 dignitaries was White House honey produced from the first-ever beehive on White House property, located near the first lady’s vegetable garden.

Sweet…

Photo credit: Reuters/Ruben Sprich (International Olympic Committee president in June), Reuters/Toru Hanai (bee collecting pollen from flower in Tokyo)