An Early Thanksgiving

Another year, and I'm working on Thanksgiving Day again. I don't know how often that happens, but it seems way more often than it should. The worst thing about working this Thanksgiving is that I probably didn't have to. I asked for Christmas off this year, so I left Thanksgiving to the other editors...but none of them ever asked for Thanksgiving off, so we had all three editors at work this year for no reason. I guess the extra money might help pay for Christmas presents or something.

Anyway, you may wonder why I titled the post "An Early Thanksgiving." Well, it's not because we celebrated it the day before. Instead, my wife decided to have everything ready so that we could have Thanksgiving dinner by noon, since I had to leave for work at 1:00 PM.

Weirdly, we all wound up sleeping in later than usual despite our need for an early meal. My wife said she got out of bed at 9:30 AM. I remember her leaving, but I didn't know how late it was, so I went back to sleep, and then at 10:30 AM, I woke up still feeling sleepy. 

I checked my phone before going back to sleep though, and my eyes bugged out when I saw the time. There was only an hour and a half before we were supposed to eat. Surely my wife needed some help. I'd better get out there.

Turns out it wasn't that desperate, however. My wife had things pretty well under control. She let me help here and there, but mostly she beat that dinner like a boss.

I did get to do some important stuff though...like giving the cats some turkey cat food in honor of the day.

The kids helped me clear off and set the table.

Then my responsibilities mostly consisted of taking pictures of all of the amazing dishes that my wife made for us to stuff our faces with.

She used the air fryer that she got me for my birthday to cook the turkey this year.

It came out wonderfully, and she says it's the best turkey we've had in years. My daughter insisted that we have ham as well, so here's the meat platter for Thanksgiving:

We also had homemade mashed potatoes and gravy:

Which were super tasty. There were green beans fried with bacon, and, my wife's favorite, the homemade cranberry sauce:

She made a big dish of stuffing:

And a huge tray of sweet potato casserole.

We sat down to eat, and it was very apparent that there would be a lot of leftovers.

It's weird to have so few of us left. Ever since we moved to Houston, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas have been much smaller affairs, but this is getting ridiculous. Last year, my older son came to visit at Thanksgiving, so we had the whole family to eat that big meal. So, it's a much more noticeable drop from last year with both a daughter and son now gone. It's hard to handle this slide toward an empty nest.