Thanksgiving Day

I've been so busy with school that I haven't even had the chance to do a Thanksgiving day post. My OCDness is somewhat stressing me out because its already December and I HAVEN'T FINISHED WITH NOVEMBER YET. But onto Thanksgiving.

Mom wrote a Fruit of the Spirit on each Clementine we had in our centerpiece and Elizabeth promptly decided that "goodness is my middle name". Apparently humility is not.

By far the biggest excitement of the day was going over to Daniel and Erika's for our first holiday celebration with them as a married couple. To make a long story short(which by the way, my family thinks I'm incapable of doing),Daniel and Erika bought her parents house from them as they're moving to SC in January. Daniel moved in after the wedding so currently all four of them, plus Gramma H, are living at the house(Wesley's out at college). So not only was it Daniel and

Erika's first holiday in that house, it was her parents last. It was so nice to be there for both of those, but even nicer that we could all be together as a new family. Just us with no one else

around so we could all really visit with each other.

They did a beautiful job with the table and made us all cute little place cards. Daniel insisted that we turn our place card around so that "everyone else at the table will know who we are". Apparently he forgot that we all know each other very well, and just possibly 6 of the 11 other people at the table lived with him for 20 some odd years. The illogical thoughts that sometimes come from the mouth of a biomedical engineer are truly staggering.

Before dinner we helped decorate The Christmas Tree. Apparently there are very specific methods to decorating at 12ft.{fake}Christmas tree: colored lights and red-and-white striped candy lights go on first; shiny colored balls are then strategically placed deep inside the tree in spots that will catch the most light; only then can you move onto putting up the "real" decorations. I don't thinks its an exaggeration to say that that tree has about 500 decorations hanging on it. It was so much fun looking at all their decorations. We spent half the time saying to each other "look at this one!!".

The completed tree in all this glory.

After the younger generation play Pictionary while the older talked politics in the living room, we joined forces to play our traditional Thanksgiving game of Trivial Pursuit. I feel it should be stated that the boys team had much easier questions then the girls: "what is the largest sea animal?", "what animal lays the largest egg?" We got questions like "who was the mayor of Chicago in 1935?" We then finished off the day by watching a slide show of the wedding pictures. A lovely end to a lovely day.

"Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow." ~Edward Sandford Martin