Thanksgiving Excess

Too much turkey.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. Mostly because it’s a grown-up holiday that the stores can’t commercialize too much. This Thanksgiving, like most, my husband worked. He’s a chef at a resort, so he gets stuck working all major holidays. Therefore I cooked dinner just for me and the kids. I opted for a non-creative Thanksgiving, doing just a 4 lb turkey breast, box stuffing, mashed potatoes (real potatoes easy, box potatoes yucky), jar cranberry, box pumpkin pie and homemade cranberry bread pudding. It took just a few minutes to prep and the cooking was done in about 2 hours. I timed it right, even after an hour delay for an extremely crabby teething toddler, and had dinner on the table right at 12:30. The bread pudding was a masterpiece. I took pictures which I will post as I am rather proud of my accomplishment. Then Frank came home at 7:30 with another whole turkey breast, this one larger than the one I had made, already cooked. Plus a few pounds of beef roast, sausages and cornbread. He also brought home a raw, thawed 14 pound turkey. I had to cook that turkey yesterday. We will be eating turkey for the next week.

This Thanksgiving was also significant in that I actually had a plan in place for the Black Friday sales, managed to get out to the stores (not super early, but around 9:00 AM), and bought 80% of what I needed for Christmas. The kids don’t want anything big this year, just stupid little toys like Littlest Pet Shop, High School Musical Dolls, and Barbie. On Sunday night I assigned wrapping paper colors, and got it all wrapped up and stored in the closet. I color code the wrapping paper, like Adeline gets red background paper, Anaya gets blue this year, and Avery gets green. It looks pretty under the tree that way, and then its easy for the kids to know what presents they can open. My biggest excitement on Friday shopping was that I managed to pick up three old fashioned red plaid flannel nightgowns for the kids. I like them to coordinate, and I’ve been looking for these nightgowns for a while now. They’re hard to find in Arizona, and I didn’t want to spend a ton of money at somewhere like L L Bean or Land’s End.

My Mom is smart in that she just sends me a check for the kids presents, and tells me what to buy, and that way I reserve the right to veto her toy selections. My father-in-law buys the kids all sorts of stuff, and then pays a fortune to send it out via UPS. Kind of silly in my mind, and kind of annoying at times because he’ll do stuff like buy dollar store junk that I just throw away as soon as the kids loose interest.