Thanksgiving Traditions
I love this time of year. I love when Peets begins to serve their holiday favorites (the peppermint mocha is beyond amazing!) and I love the holiday music becoming more common on the radio. More than all this, I love that this time of year means the end of the fall semester. The one thing I love more than the end of a semester is Thanksgiving. This holiday has always been insanely busy for my family. We travel almost every year to visit with a large group of family. Spending hours in the kitchen leads to hours around the table, which then leads to hours of lying around letting it all "settle" as my grandma would put it. Our family traditions are nothing sort of...well...traditional. And I wouldn't have it any other way :)
The meal consists of all the proper fixins: a fresh turkey, artichok heart stuffing, mashed potatoes, carmelized pecan sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce (fresh from the can! I'm positive the little grooves left from the can make it taste better!), and of course the chocolate pecan pie. Every once in a while my mother will get a little too adventurous and stray from our traditional menu, which has led to several disasters including but not limited to a Tofurky (spongy and basically inedible), cranberry sauce from scratch (my dad and I have a bizarrely strong loyalty towards the kind in the can...it was a disaster because there were no grooves, there were whole cranberries. gross.), and pumpkin cheesecake (sounds good i know, but don't be fooled by the sweet name....its full of surprises....gross ones...). Before we eat, we always go around the table and say what we are thankful for. After giving thanks in prayer, we dig in! I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!