3 - Pickle Plate: This is my family’s Thanksgiving snack board while we’re cooking all day: devilled eggs, sweet gherkins, bread and butter pickles, green olives, celery, and carrots. It keeps you fed and nourished without stuffing your stomach so much that you can’t eat dinner.
4 - Turkey: Look at that glorious bird! We do stuff the turkey. Bathing “Tom”, pulling out the neck and giblets, and checking for feathers has been one of my Thanksgiving rituals since I was a little girl. I also sing “We’re having Turkey tonight!” as I bathe him. And I make him dance a little in the sink. It was cute (I think) when I was little. It’s maybe a little creepy now.
5 - Happy faces on Thanksgiving!
6 - The Sides: We always have roasted Brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving. I love them. This year we tossed in a little (okay, a lot) of bacon bits. I make have gone a bit overboard with the bacon bits, but they lent a nice smokiness and saltiness to the sprouts. We also had our traditional stuffing and cranberry sauce straight out of the can. I like it, even though if you’re patient with opening it, you can make the whole mass of gelatin fall out in its complete cylindrical shape. Not appetizing, yet appetizing.
7- Hot Rolls: Put three small balls of dough (shaped like a clover) in the bottom of a muffin pan; they’ll puff up a lot! You can make the dough from scratch or cheat and use store-bought dough. We’ve done both and the latter is so much easier with only slightly better results, that I’m partial to the cheater dough.
8 - The Complete Plate: Fully equipped with mashed potatoes and gravy poured on just above everything = an amazing Thanksgiving meal.
9 - Family Photo: My parents, me, and Kyle, struggling awkwardly with the timer on my camera to take a decent photo. Seventeen tries later, here is our decent(ish) photo.