Time to Get Your Turkey On!

This will be short and sweet, so I can keep to my goal (also because I'm tired and I need to save my energy for the week ahead).

Am I the only one who gets excited by this??

Yes...our turkey is out of the fridge, thawing and getting ready to cook! Hooray!!

This is probably going to sound weird to many of you, but...I love cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I love stuffing the turkey. I love making the cranberry sauce. I love mashing the potatoes. I love making the sweet potato souffle. I love baking the pies. I even love pulling out our good china, and I love how the house stays warm all afternoon after all the baking. I love the tryptophan-laced, sleepy aftermath, where you doze off in front of the TV, or where you sit and visit with family and good friends. I love the nearby lake in our neighborhood, where we sometimes go to "walk off" the heavy meal. And I love the leftovers (oh, the leftovers!!), which the family and I will pick at for days afterwards.

Okay...I DON'T love cleaning the kitchen after the meal. But hey--no holiday is perfect!!

Yes, Thanksgiving dinner can be an awful lot of work, and occasionally stressful, when I play hostess. However, the challenge of preparing such a grand, elaborate feast is very enjoyable for me, and the joy I get from pleasing family & friends with good food is almost a natural high (and since I'm a Mormon, you know that "natural highs" are pretty much all I can shoot for!! :) ). Besides, another thing I love about Thanksgiving is that, large meal aside, it's a lower-stress holiday than its bookend holidays, Halloween and Christmas. Instead of going from event to event to event (each one trying to out-shine the other), and the expense & stress that keeps building up, Thanksgiving invites us to take a breather...eat a good meal...relax with the ones we love and reflect on how lucky and blessed we are to have this opportunity in the first place.


This Thanksgiving I'll be hosting a relatively small crowd--just my own family, Nathan's parents, and our friends the Perry's (a family of three). But that doesn't mean I'm going to take it easy! You'll probably see more than one food-related blog post in the week to come, as I start to put everything together. If you're wondering what else I'm doing in my life this week, the answer is "counting my blessings." Plus all the usual craziness being a mother of three implies.