Thanksgiving confessions of a slacker blogger

For Thanksgiving, we invited my husband's family to come eat at our house. We worked slavishly to clean and make ready. The kids were dragged into it and required to (gasp) work. I did the shopping, decorating, dish washing, potato peeling, and I'm sure other things. :o) My husband cooked the turkey, dressing and gravy and mashed the potatoes. Yea him!! Many of the other "required" foods were assigned out. My sister-in-law G made the delicious and, at least for my family, required homemade rolls and she made the pies. My niece-in-law made the salad, salad dressing and relish tray. My mother-in-law made two favorite jellos: green pepper with lime Jello and the ribbon Jello. There were eighteen people here.

I entirely forgot to bring out my camera before the event to record the decorations and during the event to record the people! I must just be a blogger-pretender. No true blogger would have passed up that photo op. The meal was successful and it was nice to see some relatives I hadn't seen for at least a year, and one couple I hadn't seen for two years. This wasn't B's whole family--more like one third.

I'm game to do it all again next year or even at Christmas this year. I decided that if we were going to do this with any regularity, I'd trade in the plastic table cloths and try to get some good, matching cloth table cloths. I also got some drastically reduced cloth napkins to go with the green table cloths. I used "real" plates and silverware--almost all dishwasher safe. Clean up wasn't bad.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, my family came here for Thanksgiving dinner. There were 19 people here, including one friend TD.

It seemed to me, once the food was laid out, that by some unintentional brilliance on my part, my sister had had the lion share of the cooking. ;o)

For this go-round, my husband was in charge of the mashed potatoes and the gravy--easier duty than on Thursday. I made two relish trays, green salad, peeled the potatoes, made ribbon Jello salad for the first time (the secret is putting the first layer of jello in the freezer--thanks Sis for cluing me in), and I had to clean up and set everything up. L decorated and set the tables. My sister made the bread dressing, pies, whipped cream, sweet potato something-or-other (and I cooked that) and Dixie salad. Her husband deep fried or smoked the turkey. I'd never had that before.

For Saturday's meal, I did break out the camera before the dinner because we were waiting for my sis to arrive. I took some pictures but then once my sister arrived, I was busy trying to get things ready and entirely forgot to take any other pictures for the rest of the evening. So for what it is worth, here are a few photos but in no way a good representation of the meal or the attendees.

B is in the background, probably dealing with the potatoes at that point. In the foreground we see my niece M and my daughter L.

Here are my nephews R, C and R with my son T watching something on the computer.

Here are my son J, my nephew W and my nephew A. You can see that I employ the very latest techniques for keeping children out of the middle of hectic meal preparations--electronics.

My nephew T hid under the pool table to avoid getting his picture taken, otherwise all the under-18-year-old kids are pictured here. My niece C and her husband D came with my sister and her husband--no pictures of any of the four of them. (Maybe I will later borrow pictures from my sister-in-law's blog---shh, don't tell---since C is a true and dedicated blogger and would never let such a good photo op pass her by! I admire that about her.)

Here is a picture of the "kids" table.

Here are my brother and sister-in-law sitting at the "adult" table. I'm thankful they came for Thanksgiving. It was great to have almost all of us together. We were missing my nephew and his wife who are away at school and my niece and her son. Of course, we were missing my mother who was better off staying at her assisted living place for the evening.

I'm thankful that holidays and food bring people together. It was great to see everyone and to break bread with them.

Both dinners went well and maybe if we do this about 100 more times at our house, I'll really have this system down. Furthermore, I will continue to perfect that "delegate everything to everyone else" technique that I was practicing on my sis this year! Ha ha!