Thanksgiving in France

It feels weird to wake up in bed on Thanksgiving morning and not jump up to get busy cooking.
Things are so different here. I'm making sweet potatoes with whiskey, along with apple pie. We're eating at 3 at a friend's house, so my day stretches out relatively free.
We met a friend for coffee, ordering a second round since I didn't have to rush back to teach online.
The strange thing is that I know if I need to buy last minute ingredients, I can. It's only a holiday to us Americans. No one else is taking the day off.
In the States, I might send Earl out to the 7/11 in search of ingredients I forgot. Here, the groceries are all open and ready to serve.
At the market on Wednesday (our town has a market on Wednesday and Saturday), I was thinking about some of the things I enjoy about living in France.
I picked out vegetables at the vegetable seller and she threw in a free lemon. I moved on to the stall that sells eggs and potatoes. I told her I wanted six eggs that were a day old. My choices are 1-day old, two-days old or older. The price depends on how fresh the eggs are.
She places each egg in a carton. Many of them still have chicken poo on them. She says the 1-day-old eggs are too strong for her. But I used them last night in brownies and they tasted delicious. I never thought about the strength of the taste of eggs.
We went for a drink last night with our friends Jules and Jack. I ordered an amaretto coffee and it arrived with a mountain of whipped cream on top.
As the evening grew later, Jules and I walked over to the butcher, who is open until after 7.
She ordered some ground beef for chili. The butcher cuts off a slab of meat and runs it through the grinder.
After he puts the meat or the chops or the turkey on butcher paper, he always presents it, saying "Voilà, voilà!"
I love that he says it as he serves each customer.
Last Friday, we went to a bar for fish and chips. Every other week, the fish and chips truck parks near the bar. They deliver fish and chips to our table as we drink wine from the bar. It's a win-win for both.
The Georges DuBeouf "beaujolais nouveau" had come out, so vendors were selling it in the restaurant. I believe the four of us, with various other English-speaking friends bought three bottles.
Many mornings, I'm tempted to lie in bed rather than getting up and running. I'm not nearly as dedicated to it as I was back in the States. But when I do go out, I'm always happy that I spent time in the morning, enjoying the mountains and sometimes the sunrise.

Sometimes I run out to the local lake. It's a busy road, so if it's still dark,
I run on the sidewalk in this direction, confident cars will be passing. 

 My running friends get a different picture most mornings, so they can soak in the scenery as well.

Daylight

I'm not writing on my blog as often, but, overall, life is fulfilling and our friends are abundant.
So today, on Thanksgiving, even though we are far from our children and my parents, Earl's sister and brother, along with the nieces and nephews, we're thankful for the new life we've found and the people at home who still love us when we journey back.

A Pause

During this busy holiday weekend, just a pause to tell you that things are better. 

If Spencer and his girlfriend start their morning with Echinacea tea, I feel like everything will eventually fall into place. 

Had a lovely, if loud,  Thanksgiving with my family. My parents from Florida, my brother from Texas, and my nephew from Virginia with his 4 children, including these two little guys. 

Now you see why it was loud. Plus their sisters, 3-year-old Lydia and 2-year-old Lorelei. 

Today, back to my brother’s to celebrate my mom’s 80th birthday.

Saturday Snapshot -- Mouth Full of Chocolate

Join West Metro Mommy for this weekly meme of photos people have taken and share on their blogs.
We had a fairly laid back Thanksgiving, but at one point in the afternoon, 3-year-old Regan asked whether I'd come play with her. Of course, I did and she set up an elaborate tea party.
A piece of cake and a piece of Buckeye candy were on Regan's dessert plate. Suddenly, I looked down and the entire Buckeye was gone.
"Did you put that entire thing in your mouth?" I asked Regan. She nodded, but her full cheeks and over-wide eyes told me the answer before she did.

Tucker also got to meet his new cousin Benjamin and he wanted a selfie. So I held up  Benjamin for Tucker to take a selfie with him.

We also got a family snapshot while all of us were in the same place.

Hope you  had a lovely holiday, if your an American, and that everyone else had peaceful weeks.

Thanksgiving Traditions -- Not So Much

This year was an odd Thanksgiving, so I tried to come up with some new traditions to add for my family. The one thing I hoped to do, bake cookies in the shape of a turkey, did not happen. Why, you may ask? Well, the turkey cookie cutter which I saw on Corey's blog, and which I felt sure I had in my stash of cookie cutters, was not there.
On that Wednesday, after my darling husband had already mixed up the cookie dough and placed it in the refrigerator, I called my mom. "Didn't we have a turkey-shaped cookie cutter?" I asked her.
She thought that we had.
"Did you keep that one?" I asked. She had handed over all the old cookie cutters to me. I didn't figure she'd kept out the turkey for sentimental reasons. So she laughed and said she'd look for it, but since she lives in Florida and I live in Ohio, I had no chance of getting it in time for Thanksgiving even if she found it.
I sent my darling husband in search of a turkey cookie cutter on the day before Thanksgiving. One of the worst days to go to a store, especially a grocery store. He looked at World Market, Kohls and Kroger. No luck.
I pulled out the big bag of cookie cutters. I could do leaves -- those are fine for autumn, and even though this leaf is obviously a holly leaf, it would pass. I could make some orange icing and call it a fall theme.

Then I looked at the cookie cutter that I have called a dove for years. I couldn't decide why it would be with the Christmas cookie cutters if it wasn't a dove, but it looks a bit more like a chicken. Could I somehow make it look like a turkey? I imagined trying to add some bigger tail feathers and some kind of wattle under its chin. That would never work.
So I went to work cutting out leaves, dove/chickens, hearts, some stars (which are universal, right?) and some Christmas trees, because those are the ones I like eating the most.
Once the cookies were all baked, about 45 of them, I mixed up the powdered sugar icing. I was ready to add the food coloring.
"What color?" I asked Earl.
"Red," he suggested.
So I pulled out all of my food coloring boxes and discovered that he must say "red" every year because each box was devoid of red. So I settled for green. Bright green.
I slathered on the icing and asked Earl to decorate with red hots and sprinkles. He must have been channeling Tucker as a small boy, because he loaded up those cookies.

So the finished products were colored perfections.They stayed on the waxed paper drying, until the first handful of boys walked through the kitchen on their way to the "man cave" in the basement.
What I discovered, as waves of boys moved through the kitchen, is that they don't really care what shape the cookies are in. They ate them all, except a few that didn't get iced.
Now I have a year to find a turkey cookie cutter. Unless you think I could somehow pass this dove/chicken off as a turkey. What do you think?

Traditions

Okay, it's time for me to stop kvetching about the fact that I'm never with my extended family on holidays. Instead, I need to start building traditions with my kids so that when they are grown up with families, they'll come home for holidays.
When I think of Thanksgiving as a kid, I remember my mom in the kitchen while I watched the Thanksgiving parade on television. Sometimes we went to my grandmother's house in Kentucky and we'd play with the cousins. Nana always had stackcake, which was my favorite (or maybe I'm confusing that with Christmas).
Right, so back to Thanksgiving traditions. My parents are in Florida, one brother is in Texas and another brother spends every Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day at his in-laws. That leaves my husband's family. This year, they are doing a run and then going to their in-laws for a 4 p.m. meal We wedged out a tiny block of time for a Thanksgiving brunch.
Then Earl will go to work in the evening. Grace is still in France, so it will be me and two teenage boys at home.
I came up with one possible tradition to add from reading Corey's blog. Corey has an amazingly close-knit family that makes me so jealous. She lives in France, but she is home in California for Thanksgiving. She talked about her mother baking cookies and showed a cookie cutter of a turkey.
Eureka! I have a turkey cookie cutter from my Mom.
So my husband mixed up the dough for the cut out cookies this morning while I was at work. Tomorrow, I can roll and cut out the cookies shaped like turkeys.
The boys and I will probably go to a movie on Thanksgiving, but if Grace was home, she would not go for that. She's very traditional. She would insist on family games probably.
So, any suggestions for Thanksgiving traditions?

Early Thanksgiving

It seems like all of my posts have been fairly negative lately, so I thought I should stop and be thankful instead.
So, here, the Wednesday after Canadian Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for: My husband who, although he came home with only one chocolate bar from France two weeks ago, has worked everyday with only one day off. Sleep in today, honey. You deserve it. And take a second day off this week.
My unswollen, though still flaking, face. I'm on the last leg of the steroids the doctor gave me to combat my reaction to the Aveda moisturizer. With steroids, the medicine steps down. So I started taking six pills a day over a week ago, and now I'm down to three. Before you know it, I'll stop feeling all jittery and need more than four hours of sleep each night. I am accomplishing a lot since I don't need sleep. When you get up at 3:30 a.m., you can get an amazing amount done by 6. It's like the day's half over.
A second car. We've been a one car family since Labor Day Weekend when Spencer drove in front of a truck and, basically, had the front end of his Honda Accord taken off. No one was hurt, but for over a month now, we've had one car. That means I've just driven everyone where they need to go rather than Spencer or Earl (or Grace while she was still home) taking a car. Somedays, I never sat down in my house, just walked in the door after work and drove people around all evening. But now we have a second car. That the boys can drive to school or Earl can take to Home Depot. It's an Explorer, but, since two of my children have totaled cars and I have one more learning to drive now, I wanted something big enough to keep him (and the rest of them) safe -- just in case.
I'm also thankful that two of the college classes I'm teaching will end next week and I'll have a mini vacation, teaching only five course through Christmas.
Other things, yes, the weather has been gorgeous. The cats took a nap outside in the hammock with me yesterday. Well, I napped. They kind of clung to the hammock.
And when Tucker was hanging outside with me and the cats, he asked to take a picture of Tupi's fat hanging through the hammock. Not mine.
See, lots of things to be thankful for.
How about you? Are you thankful for something?

My Cup Runneth Over

This morning I was listening to my favorite liberal talk show host's program, but she was on vacation like most of the country is today. She had a guest host named Hal Sparks, who I like well enough, but he can be fairly strident. He was talking about how bogus Thanksgiving is as a holiday since the pilgrims and settlers later massacred the indians and took over their land. I wanted to ask him, although I didn't try to call, what does he want us to do at this point? Because, being part Native American, I feel bad that the Europeans felt free to run roughshod over the natives in this land. That isn't what I celebrate at Thanksgiving. That's the story that teachers focus on at schools so they can put on cute elementary plays, but I don't know anyone who gathers with their family and thanks God that the Europeans were able to overrun the Native Americans.
Instead, it's nice to take a moment to pause and be grateful for all that is good in our lives. That's why it's called Thanksgiving Day, not European Domination Day.
At a time when many people have suffered through what the media is calling "The Great Recession," our family dodged a bullet. Both Earl and I kept our jobs, and we've managed to make payments to cover Grace's college this first year.
Everyone in the family is healthy and relatively happy. Other than adolescent angst, I'd say a snapshot of this moment in time would reveal a steady family.
The dryer tumbles clothes in the basement and fresh sheets stretch across our mattresses where we'll lay under warm blankets. We ate our fill at Thanksgiving dinner and brought home leftovers, which hopefully won't spoil in the refrigerator.
We are the spoiled ones. So often accepting the fate, the luck that brought us these jobs, this home, this safety.
It's right to have a day where we stop and think about all that we have and to give thanks rather than taking it for granted.

Strangers in the Rain

I'm convinced that the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch portrays a person with a sinus headache.
I know because that's how I've felt the past four days.
"Lie down and rest," Earl urges me in between work and attending kids' activities.
"I don't feel any better when I lie down," I admit. And it's true. Whether I veg out on the couch or cook dinner or sit through a basketball game, that pounding in my head, the aching in my teeth continue.
That's why I decided to meet my friends this Thanksgiving morning for a run. When I opened my eyes at 5 a.m., the familiar throbbing behind my eyes was there to greet me. I drank some water, swallowed some B vitamins and filled my water bottles. Whether the medicine or the sinus issues, I'm thirsty all the time. I didn't take any ibuprofen or Sudafed before I left. Sometimes the medicine makes me feel worse.
I did flip on the television to see the weather forecast. Rain and thunderstorms. 39 degrees.
I went anyway. Princess joined us for a run for the first time in ages. I didn't want to miss it. But I did ask my friends to just run around the lake with me and then I would go home. The rain wasn't heavy, but I didn't want to be out in the cold rain for a couple of hours when I was already sick.
We ran around the lake, catching up on each other's lives. While running through the dark rain, I didn't even notice my headache. Maybe it's the friends, maybe it's the distraction, maybe it's the fresh air or exercise.
I decided to go on a half mile farther before they turned away from the road and headed along the river. I hugged them all goodbye before turning back to the half mile trail.
"Sing," Princess urged, "so we know you're okay."
"I'll be fine. There are lots of fishermen back at the lake."
I ran through the increasing rain back toward the lake, and I did see a fisherman. He was loaded down with fishing equipment and called out, to me, a lone woman running along the trail.
"Excuse me. Can I ask you a question?" he called. He was tall and had a rain jacket on with the hood pulled up.
Everyone knows that if a man wants to ask someone a question, he should not approach a woman alone in the dark in the rain. What was he thinking?
I turned toward him but didn't walk over to him. I was ready to make a break for it. But I know I was stupid to stop and answer his question. What was I thinking?
"How far is this path around the lake?" he asked. He held a fishing pole in one hand, a lawn chair and other equipment in the other hand. He looked miserable.
"One point two miles," I said and started off again.
"Really? Mumble, mumble," he said.
"What?" I asked turning back toward him.
"That large?" he asked.
"Yep."
I moved away from the man, away from the lake and toward the parking lot.
The world is full of people doing strange things, like running in the rain on Thanksgiving morning, or fishing on Thanksgiving morning, or stopping people to ask the distance around the lake when a sign right by the deck clearly states the mileage. Strangest of all, perhaps, is feeling like the politeness of answering a stranger's question is more important than safety. I could hear my friends, my husband's and my parents' voices echoing in my head as I climbed into my dry car and locked the doors behind me.
But, for the most part, people are trustworthy and not predatory -- just strange, like me.

Thankful for the Rush

Aaaah! Here it is, a holiday. Time to sleep in and laze about the house, watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and sip some coffee. That is unless you're me and crazy enough to overbook even on a holiday.
It's hard to resist a Thanksgiving Day run that offers a bottle of wine at the end. So I'll be leaving soon to join two of my friends. We'll tie electronic chips to our shoes and run four miles before queuing up for that bottle of wine. My friend Pam, who hates to have any attention drawn to herself, signed up for the run but isn't going, because people might look at her and realize she's Pam. No, wait. That's PAM!!! Why couldn't I tie her chip to my other shoe and get two bottles of wine? I'm still mulling this one over.
Last night I lined up the recipes for today's big meal according to which would take the most time. The turkey, of course, a good four hours. We're going with a tried and true recipe that includes apple cider and soy sauce. Don't ask, but trust me it's good. Next come the sweet potatoes with Jack Daniels that take over an hour to bake. Tucker's in charge of the corn casserole at one hour. Cheesy garlic mashed potatoes a little less than an hour. Green bean casserole less than half an hour. Rolls 10 minutes. Oh, I forgot about the cranberries. I'll have to remind Grace to make those. She loves watching each cranberry explode out of it's skin as they cook into a thick jelly.
I looked at my recipes lined up along the counter and realized I needed to put the correct pan or casserole beside each one. If Earl started the sweet potatoes with the wrong pan, the rest of the dishes would fall into the wrong pan. It could be a disaster. Suddenly, I remembered the time Suburban Kamikaze went to her mil's house for the first time and made fun of her for laying out serving dishes with little name tags in them -- chips, rolls, lunch meat. Maybe I have become that person, the Midwest woman with name tags in the serving dishes.
We're trying to eat at noon then go over to Earl's sister's house at 2 to see her daughter home from Chicago and her other daughter's one-month-old. Then Earl has to go to work. The kids and I will come home and I'll finally have that lazy day I had planned.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time that you count your blessings, and, I do, but it's also a time when I miss family. I called my mom yesterday morning while I was on my way to work.
"Will you please come up for Christmas?" I asked. "I'm so tired of having holidays without any family around." I could feel myself near tears, but if you'd asked me I would have said I didn't feel especially sentimental about celebrating with just our immediate family, again. Mom said she'd talk to dad about it. I know it's hard on them to travel. They're in their 70s now, but we're so sewn in by swim team practices and basketball games. The kids can't get away for more than Christmas day and Earl has to work. We are caught here.
So, I am thankful for work. Earl saw his company teeter this year, and although he didn't keep the job he enjoyed, he did keep a job and his salary. I have more work than ever, and even if I complain, I'm grateful.
I'm thankful for my husband, who spends those new day time hours when he isn't working, taking care of the house and doing laundry, so I won't have so much work to do. I'm thankful and know I don't deserve a husband who always puts me first, thinking of my happiness.
I'm thankful for the way I see my kids growing and changing, becoming independent people, even when they are pains.
I'm thankful for my friends, who are spread few and far between, but loyal and wise.
Happy Thanksgiving. What are you thankful for?