Thanksgiving has ALWAYS been my favourite Holiday. While most people celebrate their Birthday's with cake and ice cream, I have spent mine eating pie. The fact that every 7 years Thanksgiving falls on my Birthday has nothing to do with the reason why it is my favourite. Not at all. Imagine a table covered in delicious food, family that have travelled near and far to be together, laughter, games, and a moment when each of us express out loud the things that we are grateful for.....THIS is why I love Thanksgiving. With this national day of gratitude we have all of the family merriment sans the materialism that Christmas seems to bring. I can't imagine not having at least 1 day a year when I reflect on my many great blessings and some simple ones too (like flush able toilets).
This year for Thanksgiving we invited our beloved neighbours Hugh and Mary to experience a proper American Thanksgiving Feast as well as the missionaries from our church and a single bloke named Russell who attends our church. I put together a very traditional American Thanksgiving menu of turkey and cranberry, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, sweet potatoes, homemade bread rolls and honey butter, shrimp cocktails, devilled eggs, and homemade pecan, pumpkin, and caramel apple pecan pies, um yeah....I pretty much went all out. John brined our turkey with yummy seasonings the night before and continually basted that bird for hours while it cooked, and it was fab.
I have only made gravy one other time so I must confess that though the flavour was good the texture was....umm....not quite up to par. Mary loves to retell the story of Elder Rasmussen excited about gravy eagerly reaching over to the gravy boat and pouring it (or attempting to) on his potatoes. Mary said she had heard of having lumpy gravy, but never of having gravy that was 1 lump. I laughed and told her that in our culture it isn't gravy, but turkey jelly. Boy does she love telling that story :) The thing I love about Hugh and Mary is that we can laugh and laugh hard.
My favourite pie in the world, Kentucky Pecan Pie.
Traditional Pumpkin.
Recent favourite of caramel apple pecan pie.
My family famous bread rolls.
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving even though we were away from family. We are blessed with Hugh and Mary who are able to come and keep us good company and celebrate some of our most important occasions with us. We are blessed to have them and I was very grateful for them this past year. We ate ourselves sick and then shared the left overs with our guests and friends, this is what Thanksgiving is all about.
