Hope you all had a wonderful week - Thanksgiving here was terrific - so busy, but great to see family and friends - both new and old. We topped out at 27 (including some old friends who stopped by for dessert) - everyone had a chair and spot at a table that wasn't too squished, plate, napkin, fork and knife, as well as plenty to eat and drink - and that all takes some doing, let me tell you!
One thing I can't seem to get right is the photographs... I start out doing okay... taking some here and there when I get a second... hand off the camera... and yet, every major holiday I feel like there are so many images that I failed to capture. This year I forgot to take any of everyone sitting at the tables, just one of the turkey out of the oven, but not all the other food... not even a single photo of each person that was here... has anyone found a good solution to this besides hiring a professional photographer to document your holiday?
Here are some of my favorites (as well as a couple of cheats from last year showing Jack and Stephen cooking) -
At Thanksgiving, Jack is known around here as "Cranberry Man"... he picks through bags of cranberries and eliminates any that don't meet his strict quality control standards and then makes homemade cranberry sauce as well as my grandmother's Cranberry Orange Nut Bread.
Stephen has become well known for making pies each year - Pecan and another recipe from my grandmother, Coconut Macaroon - they are both delicious and much too fattening!
For the last several years, James has made the homemade dinner rolls. This year we tried a new recipe, Golden Pull-Apart Butter Buns, and they were wonderful. You can find it along with lots of yummy ideas on the King Arthur Flour Blog.
(photo from King Arthur Flour)
James had a lot of homework to catch up on over the break after missing so much school when he was sick, but he has inherited my procrastination gene and insisted that he wanted to polish all the silver first ☺
Here is a quick shot I took of our 28-pounder when it finally finished cooking (an hour and a half after it was supposed to be finished!)
Plenty of time for the guys to hold their annual football game in our backyard before we ate - helped them all work up an appetite for all that turkey!
My niece, Ella, decided to stay warm and watch the game from the porch.
One tradition that we have maintained for the last five years is having our guests write in our "Family Blessings" book. If you are interested, you can read more about that project here.
Here are my two youngest nieces writing in the book -
The two new girlfriends that were introduced to the family were lovely and I would be thrilled if they both became permanent fixtures at our Thanksgiving table... especially as they both wrote in the book in pen... but I was thinking that it would have been rather rude of me to race across the room, grab the archival marker out of their hand, and ask them to please write in pencil ☺
and there are the highlights...
Now I'm in the process of putting out all the Christmas decorations, working on some early CHA projects, and attempting to put together a December Daily album ala Ali. I'll try to post some photos soon.
Have a great day!
