Thanksgiving

With the preparations for Thanksgiving dinner, and then the following downtime, I wasn't able to post my Thanksgiving blog earlier.

I hope that everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a wonderful day! (I hope those of you who don't celebrate Thanksgiving also had a wonderful day!)

I had decided to go ahead and make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, even though I wasn't sure how many would be here for dinner. My elder son and his wife recently moved out of state and are just getting settled and my younger son was not sure whether he was scheduled to work. So we thought that there might well be just my husband, the medical student who is living with us, possibly one of his classmates, along with me for dinner.

Come Thanksgiving, I tend to channel my Mom, who cooked for holiday meals as if we were being visited by a battalion (at least), who'd been on short rations for a month, so despite my conscious decision to pare down the menu, given that the turkey would be about 12 to 14 pounds, there was going to be FOOD and leftovers galore, but I decided to go ahead with the turkey.

Wayne,the med student,suddenly had a contact from a cousin who wished to visit this week and we agreed not only to the visit but to have him join us for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Then we heard that there were some students from Taiwan that were friends of his cousin, who had been in the country for about six months, studying at NYU and they asked if it might be possible to invite them.

So, where we thought that we might have four to six people,we ended up with eight. (It turned out that my younger son and his girlfriend were not able to come, after all.)

We had a wonderful time! The three girls were delightful; very enthusiastic and curious about the custom of Thanksgiving and the food. They enjoyed everything and even took pictures of the turkey! They were unfamiliar with Reddi-Whip and this provided an some impromptu entertainment.

They were completely enamored of my dog, Meka and our cat, Carolina.

The conversations were enjoyable and easy.

It was wonderful to be able to share dinner and our home with people we would never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. It's good to see ourselves from another point of view!

Another benefit was that it cut down on leftovers, though it still didn't eliminate them completely!