[ Thursday, November 27, 2008 ]


Thanksgiving Thoughts
Happy Thanksgiving to you all! For the second year in a row, I'm retired from making the entire Thanksgiving Day feast. While I truly love to make the ginormous feast, with all of the planning, preparations, tastings, and happy smiles from my guests, not having to do it all is kinda nice. Let me take a quick walk through history to how I got here.

While I was growing up and through the high school years, we had Thanksgiving dinner prepared by either my mom or my aunt (my Dad's brother's wife) and we would take turns having it at either one of our houses. My cousins were all quite a few years older than me so I never really got along with them all that much (plus I was a shy nerdy kid). So, when my cousins started getting married and such, we didn't spend the holidays with them any more and it was just at home with my parents and whatever relatives on my mom's side that were visiting from out of town.

Then when I got married to G, since my mom was getting up in years, and G's family didn't really celebrate the holiday the traditional way (they're all foreign-born) we prepared the Thanksgiving meal for our two families. I worked on probably half of the meal and everyone else shared in the preparation. And then as we started having kids, it grew more and more. But when G died and it was harder to pick up and go places when M was little, I just invited everyone over to our house and I cooked the entire meal. It was actually a good excuse for me to be creative and try new things every year. And since the in-laws were Chinese and not that familiar with all of the traditional fixings, I would try to stick in one Chinese "style" dish into the menu.

Now, I'm in a new chapter of my life, with a new future wife, and my mom passed on a couple years ago, Thanksgivings are being spent with our "new" family, which is WAY larger. So, now I'm just making a couple of dishes to bring amongst dozens of other dishes that will be shared on this holiday. Of course, we're still getting with the other part of our family (M's mom's side) tomorrow as they will always be part of our family too.

So I have to say, that on this Thanksgiving day, even though some very dear ones are no longer with us, that I'm very thankful to have so many family members to share the holidays! Oh, and thank you too for stopping by to read my blog!

Happy Thanksgiving and I hope yours day is a good one.

Here are links to some Thanksgivings past...
Turkey Day 2006
Turkey Day 2005 and photo
Turkey Day 2004
Day 27

yam [11:08 AM 2 comments ]