Families R Built with Love

There is a lot I like about Thanksgiving.  I love setting a pretty table.  It is important to me that the setting look beautiful and allow us time to gather as a family around a  meal, filled with love and laughter.  I love the fact that our table reflects so many different facets of our lives.  There is the beautiful flatware that was my mother in laws.  She and Dad got it in Thailand when he was stationed there and upon her passing, it was gifted to Kirsty and I.  Every year I polish it up for the Thanksgiving table. The pattern is very unique and its wam golden color is perfect for a harvest celebration.   There are the silver candlesticks that I grew up seeing on the table.  There are various glasses in a wildly mismatched group that were my grandparents and great grand parents.  I would be hard pressed to find more than two alike but all our beautiful---glass itself was so thin and gorgeous back then!  The actual plates are a set that Kirsty and I bought when we began hosting the holiday dinner.  The only set we had large enough for all to eat off of prior to that was a set of Haviland that has been in my family for generations. But the menfolk were reluctant to eat thanksgiving dinner off of a plate with roses on it!  LOL  So I bought plain white plates with a simple silver banding around the edges.  They are perfect and don't clash with anything.  We do some type of handmade centerpiece that runs down the center of the table--our table is very long with both leaves in it.  You can seat 12 around it and that is almost the number we have each year.  The kids help me make place cards for everyone--that project starts tonight at our house. 

I love the fact that we are all together around the table.  It is very important to me we all sit together and not  with the kids relagated to some side table somewhere.  I probably wouldn't care if there were lots of other cousins and such, but in our family and my extended family, we have mostly all the kids!  Plus, I work hard to teach my kids proper meal etiquette and they need a chance to use fancy china and show their relatives that they know the napkin goes in their lap etc.

I love the bustle of the kitchen on Thanksgiving day.  I have memories of this from way back when I was little.  My grandfather always prepared the root vegetables, my grandmother did the turkey, my mom did sides and I think everyone did pies.  There is always a LOT of food and definately more than is needed for that one meal.  But we send home leftover dead bird with the meat eaters and I am a whiz at finding recipes that use up everything else. Soups, vegetarian pot pie,  sweet potato meadow muffins and the cranberry coffee cake are pretty much givens but there have been others.  Nothing better than home made cranberry coffee cake for breakfast the next morning!

I wish we had a bit more say in the foods themselves. There is no flexibility to try a new recipe ever, because my in laws are not adventurous eaters. I love trying new recipes.  Like I would adore making pioneer woman's roasted carrots for the meal.  But the world as we know it would end,so i will save that for a time when it is just us.  Also we are not allowed to use spices.  They like their food bland. Very very bland.  We can add salt and pepper at the table but I am a real spicy food kind of woman so it is a bit blah for me in that regard.  But I just remind myself that probably why it is so easy to figure out ways to recycle the leftovers into new recipes is that they are veyr bland and won't compete with whatever I decide to do with them the next day! :-)

I like watching my kids snuggle up on the couch with their aunt to see the Thanksgiving parade.  Myself, I have never been into parades--my grandparents were never successful in cultivating any kind of interest in that in me.  My kids love it though and I love the fact that KC looks forward to that time with his aunt every year.

Most of all I am thankful that we are together, that we have this moment in time to enjoy one another and to make memories together.