Thanksgiving Thinking

 

Another Thanksgiving has come, giving us a day to focus on being thankful for the gifts God has blessed us with. In his sermon last week, Pastor Mark mentioned the 10 lepers who Jesus healed. The story reminds us that thankfulness is a rare thing, so it is good to have a special day set aside to think about His good gifts to us. Many of those gifts are intangible -- we know of them through His Word and can “see” through understanding His Word. But many of those gifts are also visible and physical -- we see their faces, feel their hugs and hear their laughter when we get together on that day. And like so many other Thanksgiving days before, this Thanksgiving was full of those good gifts – the abundance was everywhere, and it was palpable.

I’ve been writing this blog for about 6 years now and for each Thanksgiving I’ve written about (I’m sure I haven’t hit all of them), the main highlights, and even many of the details, remain the same. We went to Mom and Dad’s again. The house on Dix Road still easily holds us all, even though the kitchen is pretty tight. As always, the food was tasty and plentiful … very plentiful. One of the reasons I always appreciate a cold Thanksgiving is because we can use the screened-in back porch for the overflow. We had about 50 pounds of turkey, 10 pounds of mashed potatoes, the traditional and, in some cases untraditional, fixins. Mac’n Cheese, cranberries and homemade rolls, yes, but also Kelly made Jalapeno Poppers, which I’m told were muy caliente. I think Mick even shed a few tears over them. We had the traditional Pumpkin and Pecan pies and the decidedly untraditional “Crack Pie.” (Dad wondered if DEA agents would be staking out our house.) One of the Orr kids tried her hand at Cowboy Bark – which was devoured. The dish was sitting right in front of our watchful eyes on the dining room table and suddenly, it was just gone. Poof!

 

And like so many years before, this year was teeming with hordes of kids, some crawling around in their Pilgrim costumes, pretending to be horses, one crawling because she can’t walk yet, girls twirling around, boys running with their Nerf guns, teenagers gathering in the other living room and sharing their favorite YouTube songs and Studio C clips. Occasionally, we wonder: what did we used to do before we had all these kids? I’m sure we celebrated Thanksgiving and had lots of fun doing it. But there is such a richness in being surrounded by all the kids, watching them play and laughing with them (and often at them).

Many of us worked for much of the afternoon and evening on a puzzle. Only 500 pieces? Piece of cake. We’ll have that thing put together in no time. Of course, when much of the puzzle work is narrated with funny stories about crazy dreams (hint, hint), these things can get stretched out a bit. It was finished well after dark.

 

The guys played cards, again. We sang songs, sometimes spontaneously while washing dishes. (Yes, we wash dishes by hand. Mom got rid of their dishwasher decades ago: it took up too much cabinet space in their small kitchen and it never worked that well. So, there’s almost a continuous human dishwasher standing at the sink washing … plastic cups. Yes, we wash out plastic cups. Ask Mom about that one. Ha!). Toward the end of the evening, we sang Christmas carols. Unfortunately, we started “Angels We Have Heard on High” a little bit too high and Kelly ended up having to resort to extreme measures to hit the high notes. I think my stomach is still sore from laughing.

 

One of the funniest parts of the day for me was when we celebrated birthdays. This year, we lumped October and November birthdays together on Thanksgiving. That gave us 8 birthday people: Jordan, Isaac, Trent, Anna, Aleyna, Alix, Caleb and Glenn (our Virginia cousins, Jordan and Caleb, participated via FaceTime!). In all this melee, during singing all 3 verses of “Happy Birthday to You”, I realized Trent (who turned 4 exactly one month prior), kept turning around and looking at me with a questioning look on his face. In the din, I could just make out him saying “Is it my birthday, too?” I nodded my head yes. Then he said “Am I 5 now???” I just started laughing - it was too noisy to explain it to him right then. Cousin Evan (8) came up and asked him how old he was and he held up 5 fingers. Ha! So glad I had the camera!

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Like so many other Thanksgivings before, Thanksgiving 2014 was a full, good day filled with so many gifts. My prayer isn’t just that God would continue to bless us, because He does out of His goodness and mercy, but that we would continue to see his blessings and be thankful for them. May we be like the one leper who returned to give thanks, and may we do it daily.

Thanksgiving 2013

 

This year, we …

… planned to eat between 12:00 and 1:00 … and we actually did!  When we were getting our food, it was 12:30.

 

…  played two marathon games of HeadBandz.

 

   

… laughed at how silly we all looked wearing the head bands.

 

… ate a lot of dessert. Oh wait – we do that every year.

…marveled at how big the kids are getting (we do that every year, too. ;-).

…enjoyed feeling vigorous kicks and rolls from the newest Mozingo baby, due late January/early February.

…thoroughly enjoyed all our little pilgrims.

 

… and the annual Thanksgiving play, although next year, we’ll try to do it before 10:00 at night. They were wild! :-)

I’m already thinking about next year and have made myself a vow. I will do my best to come up with some sort of costume for these 2 guys. Thanksgiving prep has always meant making sure I had all the parts for the pilgrim dresses gathered up and ready. I really didn’t even think about costumes for Grant and Trent until the morning of Thanksgiving! :-)  I guess in some ways, I’m still adjusting to a life with BOYS!  :-)

Thanksgiving 2012

The years and holidays can start to blur together over time, but I’m sure Thanksgiving 2012 will stand out in our minds because it was the year of The Crash. In the week leading up to Thanksgiving, there was a flurry of emails between me and the other siblings while we divvied up the dishes and duties that Mom and Dad usually take care of.

Kelly, Heather and I went down to Mom and Dad’s on Monday so we could get the house ready. We did all the cleaning and set the tables with Mom and Dad’s best dishes and silverware. Mom spent most of the time trying to get comfortable. She got up several times and hobbled into the kitchen and also tried out a different chair for the first time since she got home from the hospital. After lunch, I started a double batch of chocolate chip cookies, since Dad had almost finished off the batch that he had in the freezer. Yes, this is a funny detail about the day of the accident I hadn’t heard of yet. Apparently, Dad had baked chocolate chip cookies the night before the accident. The next evening at the hospital, he gave Heather a list of things to do back at the house. One of the things he mentioned was the chocolate chip cookies – he wanted her to make sure she put those in the freezer. :-D  Yep, that’s my Dad; never waste dessert! We finished up around 3:00 and spent the next hour or so chatting.

Mick offered to take on the turkey roasting duties and Heather made Mom’s traditional stuffing. All of us girls made more pies than we usually do. I made 2 pecan and my first ever pumpkin pie. Mick decided to grill one of the turkeys and we roasted the other one in the oven. There’s nothing like the smell of roasted turkey to make the house feel like Thanksgiving!

Meanwhile, the girls helped gather up all the pilgrim costume pieces we could find and we went over the play. Who would’ve thought when Kelly wrote that play out 10 years ago that we would still be doing it all these years later! 

We’ve had an unusually warm November, and Thanksgiving day was sunny and in the mid-60s. After we ate the meal, Mick, Glenn, Dad, Steve, Chuck and Ron took 10 of the kids over to neighbor Dave Higgins’ place to do some skeet shooting. Dad wasn’t going to go at first because he felt like he should be there for Mom, but we convinced him to go with the others. Since we stayed at the house, I sent our camera and camcorder with the girls and they ended up getting quite a good bit of footage of the adventure.

 

Later, we pitted the guys against the girls for a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit. Let’s see: I learned that Denver backed out of hosting the Winter Olympics in 1976, roller derby was invented in the 1920s and 30s, the first English play written for children was “Peter Pan” and the word “feedback” is the smallest English word you can form with the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F! Unfortunately, because it was getting late, we had to stop before the game was over, so we weren’t able to determine a winner, but let’s just say that after a shaky start, the ladies came roaring back!  ;-)

 

We finished up the evening with an impromptu mini piano concert by Chuck, who didn’t bring his guitar again because he “doesn’t have enough time to practice.” Harumph!

The day after Thanksgiving, I was looking through the pictures and video – most of which the girls got – and decided to make a movie. It ended up being more elaborate than I had in mind at first, but we’re happy with the finished product: it gives a good overview of what a wonderful day it was!