My husband's family always goes to a buffet restaurant for Thanksgiving. Since they live here in town and my family is in another state, we usually join them.

The restaurant is nice, the buffet is quite fancy (with ice sculptures 'n' everything!), and there's a huge variety of excellent food. I do enjoy going there, and it's nice not to hassle with all the preparation and cleanup of a home-cooked meal for several guests.

But dammit, Thanksgiving is SUPPOSED to be about a home-cooked meal! I spend a lot of time missing my family as it is, and I especially feel it this time of year. Sometimes I think, maybe this year I'll just offer to cook and host dinner at our house. But knowing my in-laws, they'd likely find an excuse to back out of it at the last minute, or at the very least, subtly hint that I was showing off to disparage their tradition of not cooking.

My husband has suggested (all on his own!) that we offer to host Christmas dinner this year. I think I just might take him up on that and go all-out with the Martha-style preparation, criticism be damned.

(And everybody knows Chinese food is for New Year's! And what is "turkey jook"?)

Oh, I forgot to say that someone in my extended family is in jail EVERY Thanksgiving. This year, it's my little brother. I was just wondering if they will give him cranberry sauce and turkey...

When I was...oh, about seven my sisters and I began a tradition of marching around and around and around the inside of my house shouting "happy thanksgiving toooooo you!" about a bazillion times. It was a song of sorts, in that there was a tune. Sometimes there were verses. I always got to lead our miniature parade, being the oldest, and subsequently got to make up any verses that there might be. That tradition only lasted three or four years, more because of traveling to other places for Thanksgiving than getting too old.
Oh man, we have videotapes of my sisters and I doing that...what a great memory! :)

my grandma always fed us 'rabbit food' to hold us over before dinner was ready. celery, carrots, and cauliflower. yum. i wish i was home this year.

First time I made cranberry sauce for the boy, he said it looked funny.

Cause it didn't look like a can.

But now I think he's gotten used to the orange rind and real cranberry chunks and cloves and cinnamon. That's our tradition - my grandpa would smack someone upside the head for not having real cranberries. Sadly someone else is bringing cranberries this year. But I'll make some with those cheap post-Thanksgiving cranberries! Yum!