KN, p. 128 “Thanksgiving is a time to…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

We love to celebrate Thanksgiving in the USA. We travel for hours by train, bus, car, and plane to spend the day with relatives and friends. We Skype, jam the phone lines and cell towers with calls to people we won’t get to see in person that day. We buy exotic foods we’ve never eaten before, and try out new recipes to dress up the green beans.

 

Food shopping becomes an event to be feared. Will the store have enough cranberries/pie crusts/sweet potatoes?  Will they have a big enough/small enough turkey? Did we leave anything off the list that we’ve been adding to for days? We load the grocery carts as if we’re stocking up for the entire neighborhood for a month and are willing to stand in line, even if at any other time, we would not have the patience to do so.

 

For some, Thanksgiving is a time to eat out and avoid the challenge of roasting the bird. For others, it’s the highlight of cooking for the year – who can forget Aunt Edith’s food extravaganza for fifty cousins and assorted strangers in 2009? I have no idea what some of that food was and I stuck to the stuff I recognized.

 

On Wednesday evening, Sheila and I will help our church deliver cooked turkeys and the trimmings to needy families in the area. The next day, the Kerrian household will celebrate Thanksgiving with a sit down dinner, including the chestnut-sausage stuffing and pumpkin mookies. There will be eight of us this year. Yup, just eight. All the kids are grown, with families of their own and obligations of their own with their own in-laws and we don’t try to gather the crowd that day. Then, on Friday and Saturday, we plan to make the rounds at houses of other branches of the family, eat leftover turkey, hug the new babies, and have a slice of pie.

 

Thanksgiving is a time to say thanks for:

• Family

• Friends

• Good health

• Enough food to eat

• Enough money to pay the bills
  

• Heat

• The freedoms we enjoy

• The fabulous Kerrian’s Notebook community that now stretches to four continents. We are so grateful to have been able to share the stories with you during the past seven years and hope to share more in the future.
  

 Happy Thanksgiving to one and all!

 

 

*Photos and recipes by Patti Phillips