In Thanksgiving for ...

Every year as Thanksgiving approaches, the season of fall makes me a little bit hungrier for family and friends and for the comforts of home.

I am thankful that my family lives relatively close by. My kids have grown up knowing their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

I am thankful for good friends who help us celebrate the season of thankfulness as well. This week we will gather with some dear home school friends and make candles, learn more about the pilgrims and create felt leaf garland that I hope will become a treasured heirloom.

Again, we are hosting Thanksgiving and I am spending this week preparing: making lists, baking bread, making pie crusts for pumpkin pie, cutting up ingredients for sausage ~ pear stuffing, baking sweet potatoes and making cranberry sauce.

This year I am focusing on putting my recipes on recipe cards! I know. It is the 21^st century and I could easily store them on the computer.

I have done that in the past.

But my husband has this blue plastic box of wonderful, slightly-stained recipe cards given to him by his mother when he left for college. It is so much fun to look through the cards – dinners that my husband loved, cookies he baked, and casseroles he maybe didn’t really like. I love thinking about how his mother wrote with love all these recipes that he would take with him over 14 hours away and then back again. I want my children to one day open a treasured recipe box filled with memories and love. So this year I am making a Thanksgiving slot in my box filled with all of our traditional Thanksgiving family favorites so that one day my girls can reminisce about the memories that we are making today.

Now for that other list: washing the floors, dusting, setting the table, making “thank-you” cards, etc.

Wishing you and your family and friends a love-filled Thanksgiving.