Thanksgiving here

We had our dinner yesterday, as did many families across the country.  I personally love to cook, so I make holiday meals a rather large affair.  I tend to cook in large quantities normally, as I'm feeding a family of soon to be 7 and we all have big appetites and high metabolisms, so I have some pretty big pans hanging around for mealtimes.


This year, we had invited a few friends and relatives over to join us, but as usual nobody wanted to be bothered to celebrate with us so we had our meal just the 6 of us.  I still cooked for 30 diners, however, to make sure I had some leftovers for simpler suppers this week.  I had both a turkey AND a ham, 2 different types of stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, about 60 dinner rolls, candied sweet potatoes, candied carrots, my stand mixer bowl FILLED with mashed potatoes, and 2 pies with whipped cream.  I'm sure I missed a few things that were on our menu, I cooked a LOT of food.  I have left a bit of potatoes, some cranberry sauce, about half the meat, and a pie.  Oh, and some of the rolls of course, although they may be almost gone now with the kids snacking on them all day (I made 3 loaves of bread dough into rolls, filled my steam table pan).

Overall, it was a nice quiet day and I enjoyed cooking.  I started at 9am by making the pies, and just kept up a nice leisurely pace with it and we ate at about 5pm.  I didn't run around crazy with cooking, the kids helped with different parts of the meal, and we had a lot of fun together as a family.  The kids made hand turkeys (that's a simple activity, they trace the outline of an open hand on paper and then decorate it with the thumb as the turkey's head, fingers as his tail feathers, add legs and wings, then decorate a background) and we watched the Macy's parade on tv and other Thanksgiving and Christmas-themed shows and movies.  Scott took Jojo to the store while I was baking the pies to pick up the ham that he insisted on, which I thought was funny that he wanted one that badly on top of the other food I made.  It was a nice day, and a wonderful opportunity for us to be together as a family.  I treasure every opportunity to go nuts in the kitchen to make an amazing meal for my family, and spend the day just quietly enjoying our day and vegging out like we did yesterday.  Normally my family is so busy with doctor appointments, Scott working, homeschool lessons, shopping trips, errands, housework, and all that other stuff that we don't really take much time to spend together like that.  I do believe its time for us to make it more of a priority to spend time quietly enjoying ourselves as a family, not rushing around and doing everything that needs done with this life in the fast lane.