The MacDonald Family: Thanksgiving #1

Here in Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated in October. As an American girl...this is rather odd for me :) I'm used to Thanksgiving weekend in November and all that comes with it...Four day weekend, Black Friday shopping, and the official start of the Christmas season! As a kid we always put our tree up Thanksgiving weekend and I always start listening to my Christmas music.

Well in Canada Thanksgiving is a bit different. Here we have Thanksgiving Monday. We get a three day weekend and its all before Halloween so it can't officially start Christmas...to me it sort of feels like Thanksgiving butt the line in front of Halloween and Halloween is standing there fuming silently.

But at the end of the day this means I get 2 Thanksgivings each year and a girl who loves food like I do can't argue with that being a good deal!

I must admit though, while I spent the whole day cooking up a storm, I also spent it listening to Christmas music! I simply can't cook a Thanksgiving feast without Christmas tunes! The tree however will wait until after US Thanksgiving next month :)

Our Thanksgiving weekend started off with 2 really cool spiritual highs! 1) It was conference weekend! Yay conference! 2) One of our good friends was baptized on Saturday and Phil was able to perform the baptism! Such a wonderful experience and such a wonderful spirit was felt during the baptism and during the program for it.

After the baptism the guys took off for Priesthood session and I got to hang out with Phil's cousin and her kids...we spent the evening watching Harry Potter. Always a good time!

On Sunday Phil and I headed up to the trailer for the last time this year to help close things up for winter and bring back Phil's mom's van. But first, we both woke up with sore throats and headed to the doctor's office...two strep throat diagnosis! UGH! With antibiotics in hand we made the trip to the trailer then headed home for some rest and fingers crossed we'd feel okay the next day for Thanksgiving.

Luckily we woke up this morning feeling much better...gotta love the drugs! I started cooking like a crazy person and spent most of the day in the kitchen. Since we only have one oven this year (last year I was able to use the basement oven as well but this year we have tenants living down there so I was stuck with just our oven upstairs) I decided to take a leap of culinary faith....this year my turkey was cooked in *drum roll* A CROCK POT!

Yes...that's right...a turkey in a crock pot! I was very nervous about this idea but I found a blog post from a lady who said it could be done and gave some good tips. The toughest part was stuffing that turkey into my little crock pot but I somehow managed it. By the time dinner rolled around the meat was falling off the bone! It wasn't the prettiest turkey in the world as it was impossible to take it out in one piece, but it was certainly a tasty one! (Pay no attention to my scary looking husband or the sharp object he's holding...he's just excited to eat turkey!)

In addition to my lovely crock pot turkey I also whipped up apple/cranberry stuffing, cheddar/bacon mashed potatoes, dill new potatoes, sugar glazed carrots, green bean casserole (my FAV!!!), sweet potatoes with mini marshmellows and for dessert I made my mom's amazing holiday stolen bread! She always made it with cherry pie filling, but for Thanksgiving I decided to go with apple pie filling and cranberries with cinnamon and super sweet cream cheese...now picture all this ooey gooey yumminess braided up in a yummy sweet bread and then drizzled with icing! SOOO good! Of course we were all so full after dinner we didn't break into it very fast, but I did sneak a piece after I'd cleaned up the kitchen tonight and it turned out really well. This was the first time I'd made my mom's stolen bread all by myself! Very happy with how it turned out. Definitely going to make the cherry version this year for Christmas!

It was so nice having all 3 of our girls here with us for Thanksgiving. Alishea's friend Holly also joined us and was a big help in the kitchen today! Thanks Holly!!!