Fun, But a Lot of Work

The title, in a nutshell, describes Thanksgiving day (and the day after, when the cleanup was completed).

I was happy to provide a place for my whole family to celebrate the holiday together. We had 3 generations present and only one person from the youngest generation was missing (one of the older twins of my sister - who has 2 sets of twins - is enjoying a semester at sea, so couldn't join us). Everything I cooked was pretty straightforward to prepare, so the challenges of the day were primarily about timing - which task to do when.

It certainly is different having a party here in our condo than in our old house. For one thing, we were all in the same room rather than split up with some in the kitchen, some in the living room. Here, it's all one big room, so I was never by myself in the kitchen prepping or cleaning up. Also, we lived in our house for 23 years, so I knew where everything was, had routines established for parties and had lots of storage so we had tons of serving dishes and such. I gave away or sold a lot of things when we moved, so I wasn't quite sure what serving pieces we had. Fortunately, the huge platter, big enough for a 24 lb turkey, was still around. And, I found enough pieces we'd kept to put out hors d'oeuvres and serve the myriad of dishes I prepared. And now, we've made it through the first big shindig so it'll be that much easier the next time.