It's almost like a let down from a high. Holiday preparations centering around a large meal with the turkey as the centerpiece. All the family members, relatives both local and from out of town, and even friends and their family members. Who is hosting the large group of family and friends…who has a house large enough to accommodate everyone? And all the preparations. Making sure people coming from out of town and even out of state have a place to stay. Delegating everyone's contribution to the meal—someone brings the dessert (how many pumpkin pies will we need), someone else brings the sweet potatoes, someone else another vegetable, and there's the cranberries in some form, and so on.
And then there is all the work the hostess has to do in preparing a meal for that many people even before guests arrive bringing their assigned dishes. There's the turkey which necessitates that the same person also prepare the dressing and gravy since those items are intertwined which says that the same person also prepare the mashed potatoes.
And all that preparation requires a massive kitchen clean up and running a full load in the dishwasher before dinner so everyone can sit down to the table (or tables depending on how many) and gorge themselves. Then kitchen clean up phase two takes place with running two full loads of dishes in the dishwasher following dinner. And at this point, we haven't had dessert yet because everyone is too full to eat anything else. So, we wait a couple of hours then serve dessert (and enjoy phase three of the kitchen clean up).
And the next day (or maybe even later that night) there's the Black Friday shopping madness for those with the strength and determination to actually hit the stores. Personally, I'm not fond of shopping under the best of conditions so for me Christmas shopping is more of a Cyber Monday online type of thing.
Then we say goodbye to out of town relatives who are now hitting the highways or tackling the airports to return home.
And suddenly we're looking around and feeling at a loss because the frantic activity of Thanksgiving is now in the past. And what's worse, with a Thursday holiday which incorporates Friday into the activities followed by a weekend…well, we end up not sure what day of the week it is. :)
And that brings us to Monday—the day we try to get back on our regular schedule. And along with that, we now need to turn our attention to the next round of holidays. Getting out the decorations, trying to get our holiday card list together…
And the beat goes on. Hope everyone in the U.S. had a great Thanksgiving and everyone else enjoyed a terrific weekend.
