Ben’s First Thanksgiving!
I’m sure a lot of you are doing a double take right now. Thanksgiving isn’t for another month! Well, not in our household. This year, we celebrated Thanksgiving early! As Matt’s unit is gearing up for another deployment, we’re coming across lots and lots of predeployment training. And right around the corner is super-long training op number two, which means that Matt will be missing all of November. This, of course, means no Thanksgiving. Well, I didn’t want him to miss out on the holiday, so I decided to celebrate it early.
Every year in the past, we’ve always gone back home to Florida for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And frankly, it always turns into a huge hassle and a lot of stress. We have to go back and forth between our two families, and then there’s fighting about who we’re supposedly spending more time with, and we end up having to celebrate whatever holiday it is twice in one day. It’s exhausting and stressful. We never got to actually enjoy Thanksgiving or Christmas.
So I finally said enough. I decided that from now on, we were spending the holidays at our house, and if our families wanted to celebrate with us, they could come up here. I also didn’t want Ben to always be celebrating the holidays at someone else’s house. I wanted him to eat a Thanksgiving dinner that I cooked, to unwrap Christmas presents underneath a tree in his own house. I didn’t want him to never have any memories of the holidays in his own home. So, long story short, this was how the decision was made to have the holidays at our own house.
Because we’d never had the holidays at our house, that meant that I had never had the joy of cooking a Thanksgiving meal. And when I say joy, I actually mean it. I love cooking, and taking on an entire feast sounded like a great challenge. So, we invited some of our Marine Corps family to come over and enjoy with us, and I got to planning a menu. We had all the Thanksgiving staples, made from scratch by myself, I might add: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, carrots, and cranberry sauce. We also had vidalia onion casserole, one of my mom’s recipes. For dessert, we went into overload. I made a pumpkin toffee cheesecake, and then our friends brought over assorted desserts: apple pie, pumpkin roll, cookies, and an amazing cake that you cannot stop eating.
All of the adults loved the food, but surprisingly, so did Ben! There wasn’t much he could taste, but what he could eat, he loved. He really liked my mashed potatoes (no surprise there, they’re awesome), but he especially loved the sweet potato casserole. He couldn’t get enough of it! And this is from a kid who couldn’t stand sweet potatoes the first time he tried them. All in all, our first Thanksgiving as a family was a huge success, and I already can’t wait for next year’s.
What do you have planned for Thanksgiving?
