Thanksgiving Day

We had a really nice Thanksgiving Day... relatively quiet... with some friends we haven't seen in quite some time... it was warm in the house... while it was snowing outside like it was Christmastime. 

Liza spent the morning with us watching the Thanksgiving Day parade. This parade should be renamed "The Parade of Balloons and Commercials" because they no longer show any of the parade... only the balloons. They do show some quick acts from current Broadway plays but that is not the parade. Anyway... we watched most of the 'parade' with Liza.

After Liza left, Sheila's sister and her two children stopped by for a little while and that was a nice surprise. 

Not only was the weather rather Christmas-like but our home looked like Christmas as well. 

Every year, when it came time to go cut Christmas trees, we always felt it was a tremendous waste of resources and that we were being selfish and wasteful just so we could go out and pay $35 to cut down a tree that has grown for eight years... then put this eight year old tree in our living room for a few weeks... and then burn it. There is always a bit of waste that occurs during holidays but this one has always bothered me... especially after managing a Christmas Tree Farm for a number of years after I retired from the DoD. 

Our plan to get away from cutting down so many Christmas trees was to buy a nice, realistic, taller, artificial tree (yes, they actually do make realistic-looking artificial trees). 

I say "taller" because we have an item on our long "to-do" list labeled "new ceiling in kitchen and living room". This original plan called for ripping out our old ceiling and vaulting the ceiling to the roof joists. My health has now deteriorated enough that we are making our renovation plans simpler and easier so now our envisioned vaulted ceiling idea is out.

I still need to rip out the old ceiling, level the joists, and install a new wood plank ceiling. With this new revised plan we may gain a few inches but a few inches means nothing for a Christmas tree so we finally resorted to buying a beautiful, realistic artificial Christmas tree and it arrived just before Thanksgiving.

I didn't want to let the new tree sit for weeks before checking it for any defects or problems so we immediately put the Christmas tree up. 

So... now the bare tree was up so I figured that I might as well put lights on it... this meant digging out all the Christmas decorations. Before we knew it, we dug out all the Christmas decorations and decorated the house, inside and out, for the holidays. 

So, although these photos look like a nice warm Christmas celebration with friends, it really was this past Thanksgiving.

We feasted on cranberry summer sausage, cranberry cheddar cheese, pita crackers, candied pecans, homemade apple pie, turkey breasts and legs, country dressing, baked potatoes, gravy, bourbon yams, homemade cranberry sauce, roasted brussel sprouts with dried cranberries, and biscuits. Unfortunately, with all this cooking, I never had an opportunity to pick up my camera to shoot photos of the food!

At least I have a couple of shots from before dinner to remember our very nice Thanksgiving Day.