Good Grief! It's Thanksgiving Already?
When the holidays roll around I think about my family's lack of Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions. Both my husband's family and my family live close by, which is absolutely great. My kids have wonderful relationships with both sets of grandparents (and we get free babysitting). Because both of them are in town, we we share our holidays with each of them. In the 13 years that I've been married, I have not once made a Thanksgiving turkey. We celebrate at someone else's house with someone else's food twice. Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for my family and I am really thankful I don't have to cook for everyone. Just getting my kids (and husband) dressed and out the door is a major accomplisment. The draw back is that I don't feel like we have any traditions of our own.
Every year around this time, our lack of holiday family traditions sticks out to me like a sore thumb (at least to me it does) and every year I'm at a loss as to what we could do. But this year, while at one of my son's Thanksgiving feast at school, inspiration struck. I've finally thought of a way to have our own little Thanksgiving tradition that doesn't involve replicating the same turkey dinner and pumpkin pie that we already experience two times in one week. It does involve buttered toast, pretzels, jelly beans, popcorn, and a made for tv special. That's right. Once a year at some point during the week of Thanksgiving we are going to celebrate Charlie Brown style. On Monday night we had our special meal and then sat down to watch "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving". The food is not healthy in the least, save the popcorn, but it's cute, it's fun and the kids loved it.
Will we still be doing this when my kids realize how uncool it is? I don't know, but in the mean time, we will be making memories of our own and even if they don't want to participate later on down the road, they can look back at how silly and fun it was. I will say that, as we all know, teenagers love junk food, so they may tolerate it simply because of the food.
(I wish I had pictures, but our camera was left at my parents. Maybe next year).
***Griffin had his own special little meal. I let him have popcorn, which he's not supposed to have right now, and jelly beans and he had some peanut butter on his special toast. He didn't seem to mind.
