Thanksgivng

I hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend and enjoyed Turkey Day. Our Thanksgiving was a little unconventional, but it was great all the same.

I took the kids up to see my parents and have a turkey dinner there. My mom cooked a wonderful meal and even J tried the roast beef. He really enjoyed the turkey, which is surprising considering he was picky about meat for six years, but he gobbled it up (pun not intended). She also cooked roast beef and potatoes and all the rest. The real kicker was dessert though. We had pumpkin pie of course, but there was also a lovely chocolate cream pie to go with it. The goal was for everyone to have two pieces of pie instead of one, because there were only six of us. Needless to say, I forgot about my so-called diet this weekend.

We came home yesterday and celebrated our family Thanksgiving today. I had planned to try serving duck, because a turkey is way too much for the four of us and a chicken doesn't seem special enough. Duck, although I've never tried it, seemed a good compromise. Unfortunately, the ducks that are sold at the grocery store are still huge, and even on sale they were $30. I've never spent half that much on an entire meal, let alone just the meat portion of it, so we settled for a cheaper alternative.

Instead of a nice duck dinner (I'm not even sure I would have liked it by the way) with all the trimmings, we invested in some dough and pesto and P made a pizza. Homemade pizza is a treat around here too, and we did it last year as well. I dare say it's becoming a tradition for us to have pizza and pumpkin pie for our Thanksgiving meal.

That's fine with me though. It's delicious and we all had fun eating it. I know that turkey is the traditional thing to serve on this holiday, but I wonder if anyone else goes against the grain on a regular basis. We do it for Christmas too, although we don't have pizza. We go to my mom's for the turkey part of the holidays, but here at home we tend to have a chicken or spaghetti. No, it's not anything special and I need to work on that.\

Since buying and cooking a turkey never makes sense for our family, I have thought of a new tradition for Christmas this year. It's actually a borrowed one from my dad, but it was fun all the same. My mom worked as a nurse for her entire career and never got Christmas off. We always had our big dinner on another day, and my dad would take my sister and I around visiting everyone we knew on Christmas, instead of staying home. When I was in University, he would come see me and we would drive around looking for any restaurant that was open. Then we would have dinner there.

It was fun and nice to have an adventure to go on at Christmas. This year I think our family will do the same thing. We will drive around and enjoy the Christmas lights while we search for any place that's open. Maybe we'll have pasta, maybe we'll have turkey, but we will eat wherever we find an open restaurant. I haven't discussed it with the rest of the family yet, but I think it's a great idea. I'm always one for starting our own traditions, making things important for us and not just doing things because they're important to other people. But I do know that we will always have pizza on Thanksgiving.......