Turkey Day

Thanksgiving! It's really such a great holiday. For starters, there's all that yummy food and enough sides on the table that everyone can find something they love to eat. Forget the turkey, the sides are the stars of the show. My favorite place to be is at home and what else is there to do on Thanksgiving but be at home with the people you love? Sure, preparing the feast takes some effort but I love to cook so that's another thing to love about Thanksgiving. Throw in a four or five-day weekend because it always falls on a Thursday and you've got the recipe for a really fantastic holiday. 

This year started off really well when I woke up and walked into the kitchen to find this waiting on the counter for me. My brother is always thoughtful and he knows what I like - caffeine without calories. In the morning we had a family 5K Turkey Trot! It was sunny and cold but it was also worth it to wake up and move our bodies and have fun together at the beginning of the day. 

My sister Jessica coordinated a family zoom call in the afternoon. We were a little late to jump on the call, but we made it in time to hear what everyone was thankful for before we were split into breakout rooms a couple of different times so we could talk with a smaller group of family members. It was something that we did because we couldn't all gather together this year due to covid, but it was really nice. We're usually not close enough to be with family on Thanksgiving anyway so this was something that I think would be a great tradition to adopt in coming years. 

The main event on Thanksgiving is the meal, isn't it? It was fun to work in the kitchen with Val and Matt to make a plan of what to serve, reverse engineering from our meal start time to determine when to begin cooking each item, and all the other things that go into putting on a Thanksgiving feast. Samantha helped out with the floral arrangements and hand-lettered place cards to make our table look special.  

Everything was delicious. I tried green bean casserole for the first time ever (it was so yummy!) and our two little turkey breasts were just right to feed all of us and turned out really well. We had way too many desserts and we were so full we weren't ready to eat again for a long while.  

Corbin has been wanting to have a dance party in the street under the Christmas lights that had been set up earlier in the day so we headed out into the cold and danced a couple of times throughout the day. He loves to tango which is just having the girls hold his hands and spin him around in the air while they sing "tango, tango, tango". I have to say that I wasn't sure about the dance parties, but it was great to just be silly and laugh together. We continued that inside with a contest to see who could eat a donut on a string the fastest, a friendly game of limbo, and then seeing who could jump over the limbo stick as it was raised higher and higher. Ben won, it was awesome. 

Look at all these people that I love! It was so good to be all together for the day and to have so much time to just be together doing nothing more than hanging out. 

Natalie bought the donuts and was the driving force behind the donut eating contest so the remaining ones were rightfully hers. And anyone who knows Natalie knows that she loves food, especially sweet food. So coming into the kitchen and seeing this written on the donut box really meant a lot. 

What a fantastic Thanksgiving! I'm so grateful for my family and for all the good things I have. My life is so full and I'm blessed with everything I need and so much more.