Thanksgiving My Way...

Claude really wanted to go visit his mom again this year. After perusing our calendars for the perfect time, we hit upon a Thanksgiving visit.

Many years ago we did this for Mother's Day. I visited my mom in Louisiana and he visited his mom in Utah. It was a great way to spend Mother's Day. So doing that again for Thanksgiving seemed like a great idea. We polled our kids and found that none were going to be able to come for Thanksgiving so I set to work finding flights for Claude.

This meant I had a Thanksgiving to fill as I pleased. I invited Papa out for dinner and also the missionaries from our Church. Papa would feed Mimi lunch and then pick up the missionaries and bring them out our home for the afternoon.

I had a morning in a clean home to putz at cooking as the day progress.  I had my menu plan all out and I wrote times beside each item so I wouldn't have to think about when things needed to be in the oven. This made for a very relaxing start to my Thanksgiving.

I set the TV on Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Turn the volume off on the TV. Set up Christmas CD's to play in Claude's office. I got lots of little things accomplished while I cooked and even made it through some reading for my Sunday School lesson.

Somewhere in the morning I realized I haven't cooked a turkey in 50,000,000 years. Claude usually smokes the turkey for Thanksgiving. No Claude here and I don't run the smoker. I felt a bit of panic and then realized I had peanut butter on the shelf. If worse came to worse with my turkey roasting, we could always have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!!

Claude also left me a recipe for a pomegranate glaze for the turkey. That ended up being a great recipe. I've kept it for future use. I'm sure that glaze would be good on some other food as well.

Charlene was supposed to join us but she has diabetes and it kicked in big time and she felt she needed to stay close to her home. 

One of the missionaries, Elder Stephenson, lived in Hawaii. I had my Hawaii trip album out and the CD's of pictures and we started our visit with a quick trip to Hawaii.

When it came time to finish off the meal preparation (gravy, stuffing & potatoes all need help at once), I set my visitors to work.

Papa wanted to drive the missionaries back to Georgetown on the back roads. They left about 5:15pm with full tummies and left overs to enjoy.

I cleaned my kitchen and talked with Charlene. Then settled in for an evening of finishing a Christmas gift for a friend and watching some movies Andie gave me to give to Katelyn.

It was a very nice Thanksgivings...Sandi Style!!