Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

Thanksgiving is a mere 4 days away and tonight we set the menu. Several local friends invited us over to join their families for Thanksgiving, but we really want just a quiet day in our home, with our own family. Are we an unusual family or just one that reflects today’s families? I don’t know but we like being here. We do not have a grandmother’s home we could take our kids to, and all our siblings have grown kids with kids of their own so we really don’t feel like joining their camps. Plus it would be quite a drive for us. Instead we are having our celebration here. How does this sound? Want to come and join our crew of 4? There will be plenty of food and room at our table.

For lunch we will have:
New England Clam Chowder — a tradition for us since our 1st Thanksgiving in NewEngland

Appetizers of:

Smoked Salmon
Crabcakes
Garlic Shrimp
Bacon wrapped Scallops
Garlic stuffed olives
Assorted Cheeses

Mid-Afternoon we’re have a dinner of:
Turkey
Stuffing
Gravy
Sweet potato casserole — this has to be made with brown sugar and butter.
Creamed cheesy onions
Rolls
Cranberry sauce

After a walk around the neighborhood we’ll come back for desserts of:

Pumpkin pie
Chocolate cake
Chocolate cream pie
Cherry pie

Since we started homeschooling Thanksgiving week for us has been one filled with field trips, cooking, and book reading. This year I’m going to pull out the dissection kit I purchased almost a year ago and surprise the boys by having them work through the kit on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday we’ll cook pies, cakes, make stuffing, brine the turkey,and hopefully relax a bit too. Thanksgiving has stressful memories for us.

When we first moved to New England DH and I really needed to stay home over Thanksgiving to unpack and finish moving into our new home. Our college friend Hillary was coming in on Wednesday night to join us for Thanksgiving and see the love of his life, our Great Dane Benson. On Tuesday DH called me at work to say that our Benson had collapsed and I needed to get home quickly. It took me a long 30 minutes to get there, a few more minutes to help DH carry 150# Benson out of the basement where the two of them had been and put him into our truck. Benson died when we got him to the Animal Hospital from bloat. Needless to say Thanksgiving was very sad that year.

Several years later I learned I was pregnant and then learned I was miscarrying my first child. The D&C was performed on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Another very sad Thanksgiving and made even more tough since DH’s mom was dying of lung cancer and his family was having what they knew would be their last Thanksgiving together as a family. DH would not leave me and join them particularly since it was 800 miles away from me. MIL lived to just past New Years that year, and by the following Thanksgiving I was expecting ScienceKid, but who would have known that then.

I guess that’s another reason we like just having us together in our home, who could understand what this holiday has meant to us.