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?

No Bake Cookies

This afternoon I made some no-bake cookies. I've been trying to avoid wheat because a doctor told me long again that I had a gluten intolerance. I didn't really listen to him because giving up breads and cookies, plus noodles and cereal, just didn't seem like a good idea.
When I've gone without wheat though, I feel a definite difference. So since Monday, when I had a piece of apple pie, I haven't had wheat.
I was craving something sweet and the genius idea of no bake cookies came up. As I was making them, pouring the milk, the cocoa, sugar and butter into a heavy metal pot, I remembered the first time I'd ever made the cookies.
I was in 7th grade. We had some sort of health presentation with a movie and a take-home comic book. The movie, as I recall, was a singing group of some sort with four guys (copying off the Beatles, the Monkeys) and the guys talked and sang about eating healthy. I came home so excited clutching my comic book with the recipe for the cookies.
I remember the look on my mom's face and I think she was kind of amused that I was so inspired by this "healthy" eating group. She helped me gather the ingredients for the cookies.
Once the sugar, milk, butter and cocoa started to boil, I turned off the burner and let them cool for one minute. Then I added the pinch of salt, teaspoon of vanilla, peanut butter and oatmeal. The cookies were then plopped onto waxed paper a teaspoon at a time where they were left to harden. Mmmm.
I carefully copied the recipe in my schoolgirl handwriting onto a piece of notebook paper. At the end of the recipe, in all capital letters, I wrote "EAT!" as if someone might forget that part.
My mom was in charge of the ladies' group at church and when they put together a cookbook, she included the No Bake Cookies with my name alongside. Of course, that means I'm plagiarizing the recipe because it came directly from the healthy-eating band whose name I can't remember.
That doesn't stop me from making them though.
Now they're cooling on wax paper on my granite countertop waiting for my hungry boys to come home from school. I can claim the cookies have some sort of nutritional value, especially since I had to use the rest of the peanut butter so Spencer won't be able to make his weight-gaining drink of protein powder and peanut butter.
Bon Apetit!

Motherhood

What's that? You don't get up and bake homemade cookies for your children's school lunches everyday? Oh, dear. What would June Cleaver think?