Living for Thanksgiving

Living for the weekend is pretty much the story of my life this semester. I generally feel like I start Sunday night at 9:00 pm and go until Friday at 3:00 pm without stopping. I know this isn't exactly the case, but man I really like weekends. But they sure do go by fast.

This weekend, I'm really hoping we'll get the Christmas spirit started, regardless of Rachel's silly "no Christmas before Thanksgiving" rules. This means waking up tomorrow and making a delicious breakfast, decorating our stockings, and trimming a tree, all with "Elf" playing in the background.

I'm excited for this weekend, but I'm even more excited about THANKSGIVING. It is most definitely one of my favorite holidays for a lot of reasons I won't go into, but a lot of it has to do with the focus on my family and yes, delicious eats. My Uncle Rick is a Thanksgiving Master.

Every year, we trek down to The Woodlands to spend Thanksgiving with my mom's sister (PoPo) and her family (Uncle Rick, Cat, and Liz). I hear so many stories about people who aren't very close in age to their cousins, and therefore not very close to them at all. One of the things I'm thankful for is two girl cousins who sandwich me in age. I've always loved family gatherings with them. When I was younger, this mostly revolved around the fact that I would finally have girls to play Barbies with. My brother, shockingly, never seemed to get the hang of it and saw it as a prime opportunity to push my buttons. For many Thanksgivings, me and "the girls" as we have so lovingly dubbed them, would wake up and dress up as pilgrims, which usually meant wearing any black clothes we could find with white trash bag aprons.

These days, we're satisfied with waking up and snacking on biscuits and coffee while we watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It seems like every year, Uncle Rick suggests we go to the Houston Thanksgiving Parade, but we are lazy and that would require leaving our pajamas. Finally food is ready and PoPo puts on whatever new Christmas music she's bought at Starbucks to go with our meal. Thanksgiving night always means going to a movie.

And then it's Black Friday. We always say we're not going to go or we'll go for just part of the morning, but it almost always turns into an all day affair of spending way more money than we'd planned on. But Christmas gifts are a go.

Wow, I'm getting excited just writing about it. I really love Thanksgiving. The food, the traditions, the relaxation, the leftovers, and even just hearing about how others celebrate.

For the record, my favorite is the stuffing.