Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is a day Americans set aside to gather with family, friends or both, bow our heads and give thanks for the blessings God has given us.

 

It is wonderful to have the day off from work and I am busy this morning making my part of the Thanksgiving dinner: homemade mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.  Because these two dishes are so important to the classic Thanksgiving dinner, I take a lot of care in preparing them and enjoy watching people gobble them up.

 

I started making homemade cranberry sauce years ago after I was served this particular cranberry sauce (recipe below) at someone else's house.  It's delicious and easy to make and gets better the longer it sits.  I loved it right away because I was brought up on canned cranberry sauce.  We were a family of eight and we usually had at least three or four other relatives join us for Thanskgiving dinner so we went for what was quick and easy.  The cranberry sauce I knew jiggled on our plates.

 

We would open the cans of cranberry sauce and then it would come out in the same round shape like the can including the indentations on the side.  Next we would cut it the cranberry jelly into slices and then take a slice and lay it on a plate and push a cookie cutter in the middle of it to make a holiday shape such as a turkey or a star.

Those were the days!

My son and I will be with part of my family today and I am very blessed with a loving family, great friends, good health and a solid job.  I am also blessed to have the best readers who follow my blog and always keep me moving forward towards a healing place.

Who could ask for more?  Well, I could ask for more, but I won't. 

May your Thanksgiving Day be full of family, friends, food and fortune!  Happy Thanksgiving!


Cranberry Orange Sauce

1 12 oz bag of fresh cranberries
1 orange
Sugar to taste

Wash the cranberries, then put them into the food processor until they are chopped up to the size you like.  Put the chopped cranberries into a bowl.  Next cut the orange into relatively small pieces.  Remove the seeds.  Then put the oranges, rind and all, into the food processor until it is the consistency you like.  Pour that into the cranberries and mix together.  Next I usually add a half cup of sugar and then mix everything together.  Let it sit for at least 15 minutes before serving.

A Cartful of Gratitude

Photo Courtesy of Williams Sonoma

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you and to give thanks continuously.  And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include
all things in your gratitude.

                                                    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just like most Americans, I went to the grocery store this weekend to buy food to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

The store was crowded and the shelves were stocked with all of the things that I buy at this particular time of year: pumpkin, cream cheese, spices, nuts and cranberries.  Depending on the aisle I was in, I could tell people were carefully searching for certain ingredients for recipes traditionally served in their family every year.

 

For some people, it is just not Thanksgiving unless that particular dish is served.

 

In my family, it is the stuffing.  My siblings and I only want the stuffing that we had when we were growing up.  My sister-in-law is wonderful and she is very accomodating because she serves our family's stuffing along with a cornbread stuffing and also an oyster stuffing.  People in my family are pretty direct about what they want while walking through the buffet line and always ask when looking at the various stuffings (just to make sure): "Um, which one of these is our stuffing?"

 

It cracks me up because to us, and I know this is true for other families, Thanksgiving is all about the same food you have always eaten on Thanksgiving.  It is not a day to try out new food.

 

But if Thanksgiving is about Tradition, it is also about Gratitude.

 

As I shopped in the grocery store, I thought about how lucky I was to load my cart up with what I needed to serve for Thanksgiving and that when I pushed my cart to the check-out line, I knew that I would be able to pay for it.

 

Suppose I couldn't?  Suppose I couldn't afford what I needed and could only buy the minimum amount of food?  Suppose I couldn't afford any food and my Thanksgiving was at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter?

 

Unfortunately, we fall into a common and bad habit of thinking about what we don't have, what is going wrong in our life or what is in our way to making progress.  Instead of thinking about what we don't have, I suggest we flip our thinking and focus on the positives in our lives and be thankful for the wonderful gifts that surround us.

 

Life cannot be truly rich without gratitude.

 

It may sound like a small thing but as I placed my items on the conveyer belt at the grocery store, I was truly grateful that I could buy food to feed myself and my loved ones and that I had a car and a home for shelter.  I take these things for granted when I never should.

 

Being thankful is counting your blessings and this week when I bow my head to give thanks to God for the food and the people in my life, I will have much to be thankful for.