Thanksgiving?!?

It came, somehow. I'm not sure where the entire month of November went, but all of a sudden I was having a birthday and a Thanksgiving. Who knew?

I traveled home on Tuesday night to avoid the Wednesday rush and enjoy those new 70mph speed limits. This travel plan gave me Wednesday, Thursday, and some of Friday to enjoy the company of my family, although not all of us made it home for Thanksgiving. I suppose I was the missing one last year, but it felt incomplete.

On Thursday I got down to the serious business of cooking. We were having dinner at my aunt's house, so the heavy-duty cooking happened there. However, I made my first-ever sweet potato casserole. I couldn't find a recipe that was quite what I wanted. One of my sisters was highly skeptical as she watched me mash the potatoes and then open the spice cabinet and start smelling things. As I threw in brown sugar, butter, milk, allspice, and ginger, I made her taste it. In the end, I had a delicious dish from no recipe.

Family dinners always degenerate into political, philosophical, or religious discussions with this side of the family, which is probably how I acquired my taste for that kind of conversation. This time, we hashed out WWI, WWII, Iraq, and Afghanistan in light of my mother's pacifistic tendencies. (A lot of her world views mirror Father Dude's, even to the point of how they phrase things.) It's funny how sometimes I can see just how my family formed me.