Thanksgiving...

I can’t believe Thanksgiving has come and gone!

It took me two days to clean out my house and get it ready for Thanksgiving. I was so glad when that got done!

As is tradition, we have Thanksgiving dinner at my house. And every year the family keeps growing.

My dining room table seats 6 and my kitchen table seats 4. So for Thanksgiving we always put those two tables together in the dining room to seat up to 13 people. The kids are seated on an extra table, which is set in the living by opening up the doors from the dining room to the living room so we can all be together.

This year, my sister and I were counting how many people were coming over this year and found out that we had a total of 20 adults and 10 kids. There was no way we were going to be able to seat that many people in my dining room ---although we were missing a few family members this year---we also added a couple of new ones.

In order for everyone to be seated at the table, we decided to set up the tables in the living room and moved the sofas into the dining room. We manage to seat all 19 adults in the living room by putting three tables together. There was only enough space on one side of the table for people to walk through.

My sister came over early on Thanksgiving to prepare and cook the turkey (and in the end, she pretty much cooked everything else!) My husband, who usually cooks the ham, had my sister do that too. I usually make the simple things like stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and the veggies. But this year, I only cleaned!

The rest of the family also brought a dish, deserts, sodas and wine with them. We had two turkeys, ham, stuffed chicken, rice, salad, stuffing, corn, green beans, three types of potatoes (mashed/fried/cheese au gratin potatoes); stuffed green peppers, corn muffins, biscuits and gravy. There was so much food! I think I gained 10 pounds! I am still stuffed from everything we ate!

After dinner, the adults sat around the table or in the dining room where the sofas were set, while the kids went downstairs in the basement to play and have their own little party there with the new karaoke machine that my sister gave us as an early Christmas present. It kept the kids entertained all night long!

Unfortunately, I do not have a dishwasher so my aunt helped me with the dishes, while others cleared the tables. Once we had that done, then it was time for desert. Who had room with all that food we consumed? After looking at those homemade pies and cookies, believe me, we made some room for it!

Finally, after everyone left, I still ended up staying up until 3 a.m. cleaning out the rooms and doing the left over dishes so I didn’t have to do too much the next day. (Next on my X-mas list…a dishwasher!)

It just amazes me how much work is put into this and in a few hours worth of time, everything is over. Fortunately, everything turned out well. We had a feast --dinner was delicious--but more importantly we enjoyed each other’s company.