Thanksgiving

Nate thinks that I don’t need to type a Thanksgiving post because I “did it last year and all Thanksgivings are pretty much the same.” I told him that I think there’s an unwritten rule that all holidays have to be blogged, and I don’t want to break the rules. So, here goes:

We had two Thanksgiving dinners this year. We were planning on going to Nate’s parents’ around noon like we’ve always done, but Nate’s mom let us know Wednesday night that dinner would be at 5:30 this year. Despite the short notice, the change in plans ended up working out for the best. In the past Jody and Kevin have taken my mom with them to Kevin’s parents’ house in Idaho on the in-law years. Both of Kevin’s parents passed away this year, so Jody was just planning on having a mini-Thanksgiving (sans turkey!) at their house with my mom. Since we already had a turkey thawing, we decided to just throw the rest of a dinner together and have them come here. The food was great (Nate cooked the turkey to perfection this year) and it was fun to have them here. After dinner, we played a couple of games, I made a plaster death mask of Jody’s face (don’t ask), and we had pie. Then we headed up to Nate’s parents for round two. We managed to eat more food and more pie and had fun hanging out with his siblings. Mostly I was relieved that my kids didn’t break any of the fine china. It caused me quite a bit of anxiety to see them carrying their plates back and forth from the kitchen to the table.

Abby was sick and spent most of the day feeling miserable. Poor kid. She did have a few happy moments mixed in.

I was so tired by the end of the day that I decided to break our long-standing tradition and bag Black Friday all together. I did get a few good deals online, but there was just nothing worth getting out of bed at 4:00 a.m. for. I’m getting old. Instead, we spent the day decorating for Christmas. The kids were lots more helpful this year and once we had the heavy lifting done, we pretty much just let them have at it. They took turns being grumpy and whining, but we eventually got things done. You can certainly tell that our tree was decorated by the 8 and under crowd, but we’re fine with that. I tried to be brave and help Nate put the Christmas lights on the house. I’m deathly afraid of heights, but it sounded like fun to hang out with him on the roof. It wasn’t fun. I only made it through one string of lights before I chickened out and headed to solid ground.