In Thanksgiving for Thanksgiving

I've written about Thanksgiving before. Remember the post about John Theobalds and Sister Marie Charlotte? As I re-read it today, I realize I had forgotten to add that Sister and I made the waiting time pass more quickly with a bottle of sweet sherry.

Today I spent way too much time looking for photographs of other Thanksgivings past, so let me just say a word or two to remind me of this year's festivities. One of these days I will conquer the photos, but until then . . .

We were expecting one of the families from Washington and they arrived around lunch time (having spent the night in Breezewood), just in time for them all to go to the dentist. Why they should have a dentist who lives over 500 miles away eludes me. As we were preparing for dinner, I committed two more of the culinary stupidities which have made me persona non grata at holiday meals—see my last post on the turkey fiasco.  For Wednesday dinner I was making chili, while at the same time I was making pumpkin and pecan pies for Thanksgiving. I put one of the pumpkin pies on top of the stove where the air could circulate to cool it and then turned up the burner to get the chili to the right temperature. You guessed it. Fortunately my daughter in law asked if I really meant to have a flame under the pie and it was saved. No charred smell, cracked pie dish etc. Then I realized that the corn bread muffins I was making to eat with the chili should have been mixed with milk—not vegetable oil. Thank heaven for packages of crackers. More family members dropped by in the evening, but we got everybody to bed—and they stayed there until they smelled sausages next morning. We packed up and were all over at Liz's  in time for pre-dinner activities. It was a lovely day, so the traditional game of football took place. By the way, Jason Gay did a marvelous number on Thanksgiving football this year.

Food, wine, more food, more wine and pretty soon we were all home in bed, only to start all over again the next day with the same cast of characters at the Grosse Pointe Parade. This is where it got interesting. We had various cars and I was walking with Kate to her car when all of a sudden—I felt the ground coming up to meet me. I suspect it was a good thing that I did not put out my arms to break my fall. I have done that before and the resulting Colles' fracture would have been marginally worse that the jolted ribs and painful and spectacular bruising of my one of my lady parts. It still hurts and I cannot cough or sneeze (I now have a cold) without bracing myself.

So you can see why I stayed home while the kids went to see Lincoln that afternoon. They were most impressed. How wonderful it was that although the 14 grandchildren were home with me, they needed no supervision thanks to Emmanuel (15) and Patrick (14.)

Saturday was more of the same, this time with a trip to the Henry Ford Museum to see the Lego exhibit and some of the memorabilia of American history. Dinner at Kate and Ron's, then on Sunday the D.C. crew departed. We'd had all kinds of sleepovers and fun, but it was time for everybody to get back to school and work. It is almost a tradition that the first snow of the year falls after Thanksgiving, and this year was no exception, but the snow was light and did not extend across the route to Washington. The travelers reached home after ten hours. We were both tired, the laundry filled the chute from the basement to the second floor and not a scrap of food was left.

Can't wait for next year.