A Thanksgiving Deferred

Did you ever hear of Play-Doh cookie dough? It comes in bright Play-Doh colors but is real cookie dough—you shape your cookies and bake them and ten minutes later you devour them. That’s what we did with Max the other day. We made wreathes and candy canes and Christmas trees and space ships and snakes—your typical holiday fare. Sadly, none of our handiwork survived through the next day.

With my new digital camera, I video’d some of the action. Max kept predicting that the cookies would be “Quite tasty.” He was right.

The winter storm blew away our Thanksgiving plans. We decided to do it on Saturday afternoon when the weather will calm down. Right now many more inches of snow are predicted with wind chills below zero. The funny thing is that Kathy made all the side dishes including green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, rolls and stuffing. We had a turkey defrosted for ourselves for later. Her sister was making turkeys for today, but that’s all she wanted to do. So—we had a nice dinner with our youngest son who came in from Atlanta.

I kind of liked it that way. No pressure to pack up the car and rush out to be someplace on time. Maybe we should always do it this way. There’s always this expectation that the holidays should be a perfect Norman Rockwell scene and often they don’t quite meet the standard we have in our heads. When it’s all over we feel strangely empty and wonder what the big deal was supposed to be.

Today was a nice relaxing, low expectation sort of day. The car didn’t leave the garage. I walked to church in the morning. There was no need to go to the store. We had everything we needed right here.

When we do head out to sister-in-law’s on Saturday, I bet the whole experience will be…quite tasty.