Thanksgiving Reflections

Some Thanksgiving celebrations go smoothly. You have your shopping done the weekend before, the house is clean, and most of the dishes are prepared the day before. All you have to do that actual morning is stuff the bird and put it in the oven to bake while the family starts the day off with a special breakfast. This Thanksgiving was not one of those.  We definitely put the effort into it. But the groceries got bought late, my hubby, who does the most of the cooking, wanted to try a couple new dishes. Errands kept getting in the way, his mom needed his help with shopping and other errands earlier in the week, I worked up through Wednesday, and one thing after another meant that we didn't get anything done early.  We are used to the occasional bumps in planning, so we remained calm and carried on. My hubby left me to make breakfast while he picked up his mom, who does less and less driving on her own. Okay, I can handle french toast and scrambled eggs, my youngest daughter jumped in and breakfast went fairly smoothly.

After we ate, hubby put the bird in the oven and started cleanup. Wouldn't you know it, the sink backed up.  I don't know about other sink configurations, but when ours gets backed up, there's nothing to do but crawl under there and remove the pipes until you have that pesky area just before it goes into the wall cleaned out, that's where the clog usually is.  So that took over an hour, and in the meantime our bird got a bit browner in the skin than we intended. Oops. It was still fine, not quite at the burnt stage yet, we tented it and pulled it out 3 hours later.

With the late start and the plumbing emergency, I didn't get as much done for table decorations as I had originally intended. I did pull down the good china and silverware, but forgot to put out the crystal water glasses I intended, and everyone grabbed a glass from the cabinet, just like it was any other day. Nothing wrong with that. I put up a few decorations as a centerpiece before my family instructed me to remove them, as they were getting in the way of the food. Really, is it just because I haven't done a centerpiece on the table for past dinners that it seems 'in the way' when I attempt it now? We have got to get used to working around it. I suspose that will happen about the same time I get everything together and don't find that I forgot to allow for a butter dish and am passing around a plastic tub of margarine next to the good china. Eventually. We as a family shared a wonderful meal and followed up with a game played with 5 mismatched dice borrowed from 3 different board games. It was a really good day.

As a final note, I found this lovely compote the other day at Goodwill.  It has a light irridescense to it, is an amber color, and I'm wondering if it is Carnival glass. This picture is dark because the lighter pictures didn't show the slight irridescent gleam to it. Anyone know anything about it?  It's probably one of the cheaper productions, I did some research on it, and the patterns on true Carnival glass are very intricate, this one is not nearly as detailed. I still think it falls into the category, although it might be a more recent take on it. Really hard to know for sure, so good thing I like it for itself, and at $15 it didn't break the bank.

I know I'm posting this very late in the game, but considering Thanksgiving was yesterday, and that's when I set the table, for the minor amount I actually set it, this is it. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday, no matter how many bumps you encountered along the way.

Linking up with Between Naps on the Porch for Tablescape Thursday.