Thanksgiving...and then some

This entire week I kept telling myself I really, really needed to blog about this. Or that. But then someone would offer me pie, I would discover another paper that needed grading, or it was Lifetime-movie-naptime, and so I would (squirrel! anyone?) forget about the this or that that seemed so completely fascinating moments earlier.

But now that my mini-Thanksgiving-break is about to come to an end (only four more papers to grade and a class to prep), I can assure you that the past few days have been a gigantic success. Being the lucky bug that I am, I got Wednesday off, while husband-dear slogged away at work. So while I was at home grading paper after paper after paper, and in between writing things like "What do you mean?" and "This is not an appropriate theory to use here", making beds, cleaning bathrooms, and making sure our house was guest-ready, husband-dear was busy protecting the country doing goodness knows what and taking PT time. OK, I exaggerate. He did actually work. I think. But let the record at least state that he did come home with a gigantic keylime cake. Made by a female coworker. And I didn't wonder about that at all. Does that make me weird?

Anyway, this Thanksgiving we had a full house. And when I say full house, I mean it. Every bed we had (plus one) was filled. My in-laws came in from Ohio, and brought my friend Anna (also known as The Amish Girl) as well as their dog Trixie with them. Add that to the four of us and our two dogs, and you can imagine we went through gallons of milk, boxes of cheweez, did about two loads of dishes per day, mopped the kitchen floor at least once every three hours, and had an absolutely marvelous time.

You see, no matter what people tell you, spending holidays with the family really is the best. Husband-dear and I have spent Thanksgiving by ourselves, or with friends, and it's just not the same. Don't get me wrong, it is fun, but it's not the same as eating a huge dinner together, and then sitting down to watch an incredibly dumb Lifetime movie, acknowledge that it's a really dumb movie, and then all take a collective post-turkey nap. You just can't do that with people you'll see at the office the next day.

So, Thanksgiving was a smashing success. There was turkey, corn and sweet potato casseroles, carrots, rolls, gravy, dressing, cranberry sauce, three kinds of pies as well as the afore-mentioned cake.

But the joy didn't end there. Because we also went on a cultural/historical field trip to Andersonville, where the children (who had been there on a field trip), took great pleasure as serving as our tour guide, caught up on each others' lives, had Anna explain why Amish dresses have the number of pleats that they do (it has to do with the number of apostles), and put up our Christmas decorations.

Now that last activity was not part of the plan. We usually don't put up our decorations this early, and especially not with three "other people" in the house. If you've been following my blog long enough, you'll probably know that the Christmas decorations at our house are somewhat of a Dayton Agreement, and are the perfect embodiment of the compromise it takes to make a multicultural blended family work. So the way in which we decorate our tree, the inside and the outside of our house might seem odd to non-family members (both European and American), but it works for us, and so we leave it alone, and commence each year's decorating activities with a brief overview of who gets to what, when, where and why, just to ensure everyone is still on the same page. Outsiders, as potential deviants from our carefully plotted compromise, are usually not permitted.

But this year was different. I think we missed the memo that was sent around, but apparently the entire subdivision agreed to start putting up Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving. House after house was covered in lights, trees were put up, ladders were pulled out, inflatable Santa Clauses made their way on to front lawns, and Christmas had pretty much arrived come Friday night. Well, all that yuletide happiness made the kids yearn for their tree and lights, and made mother-in-law reminisce about the hundreds of Christmas cookies she usually bakes.

So husband-dear (after a quick consultation with the other major player in the Agreement, i.e., me), said, "Why don't we all decorate the house tomorrow, and bake Grandma's cookies!". I don't know if we'd just been watching too many Lifetime movies, but that announcement was met with general joy and excitement, and so come Saturday morning, Jimmie and I took to dragging box after box down from the attic. And lo and behold, the Christmas cookies were baked and the Christmas decorations went up, all without a hitch and with lots of smiles and laughter.

So here we are, three days after Thanksgiving, and we are ready for Christmas. Bring on the holidays, because we've got the spirit!