Thanksgiving

You might think this is going to be a post about all the things I am thankful for after the hurricane. And it may yet be.  But the reason I'm writing it is that, for us, today actually was Thanksgiving.  My in-laws, our resident Thanksgiving hosts, are heading down to their winter home early this year, so they rescheduled the holiday--or at least our observance of it--turkey, stuffing, corn pudding, and all.  The only things missing were the Macy's parade and dog show on TV and the several day weekend for eating the leftovers and shopping the outlet sales.

I am not a stranger to rearranged holidays.  My other in-laws used to invite us for Christmas in July and Halloween in September at the campground where they vacationed.  The truth is, if you assemble the people and the traditions, it ends up not mattering much what date the calendar says.  And at One Life to Live, we always taped the Halloween show around the beginning of school, the Thanksgiving show around Halloween, and the Christmas and New Year's shows just after we came back from Thanksgiving weekend.

So on this, the 3rd of November, when we haven't even changed the clocks to "fall back" yet, we sat around a table eating too much food, talking about family and politics and what everyone's been doing since last year.  We read last year's "I'm thankful for" feathers (an activity my daughter started a year ago) and laughed at how easily we could pair thankfuls and people.  And when two loads of dishes were done, we continued with pie, as if it were well into November.

I have no idea what we will do a few weeks from now, when we are faced with a four-day Thanksgiving weekend and are surrounded by people talking turkey.  Who knows?  I might think it should be Christmas vacation by then!  In the meantime, this turned out to be a nice time to be thankful. And I imagine it wouldn't hurt to do it all over again soon.