THANKSGIVING MEMORIES

So... another Thanksgiving has come and gone.  I love Thanksgiving!  The smell of the food, the colors of the table...I even love eating on china (although Patrick would prefer paper plates).  I have great memories of Thanksgiving from when I was a child and I always loved it...I remember making nut cups and place markers for the dinner...all the cousins would come...it was so much fun!  The only thing that bothers me about Thanksgiving is that Christmas seems to have taken over...not that I don't love Christmas...I just don't want to hear about it until Thanksgiving is over. (Can't we all just stop and be thankful for what we already have before we start looking to collect more?!)  It even actually bothered me this year to see that people were camping out for shopping on Thanksgiving... where are these people's families?...and can't they just cool their jets and enjoy a day with their loved ones BEFORE the madness begins?!

But that's really another story...what I really wanted to talk about is this serious problem that I have.  Like I said before, I LOVE Thanksgiving.  I have even bought all sorts of great things to scrapbook my memories of Thanksgiving...and this year, I even made my kids wear clothes to match the table so that I could have great pictures... (I don't wanna hear it...I know that's wierd...and I know someday this will produce a huge laugh when I'm dead and gone and my kids have those "remember when mom..." moments...they will miss me!)

So there we are at my mom's house, getting the dinner ready.  I whip out my camera to capture the moments...and I get a great one of my dad carving the turkey...(I even caught him with a big ol' mouthful--another Thanksgiving tradition!)









And I get a really nice picture of my sister dishing up the mashed potatoes...




And then I set the camera down to help dish up some food...and there it stays....no more pictures.  No pictures of the beautifully set table, or the kids dishing up, or the family sitting at the table right before we start eating.  No pictures of ANYONE.  And before I know it, the food is gone, the table is cleared, and my aunt is washing the dishes....and my camera is sitting there on the counter.
Now...this may not seem like a huge problem... and if this was the only time it had happened, it wouldn't be.  But I do this EXACT SAME THING every single year!  I get a couple of good shots of people cooking and then NOTHING.... I don't know if my desire to pig out takes over and I just forget, or what, but whatever it is...it happens every year.  So this year I made my kids dress in just the right clothes for nothing.  I didn't even take pictures of eating pie...
So I guess I have my own personal Thanksgiving tradition.  It's a little quirky, but at least it's given me a good story to scrapbook!  Maybe if I'm lucky I got pictures of different people cooking last year than this year (although every single year I get a picture of dad with the turkey...)  And I still really enjoyed Thanksgiving, even if I don't have any pictures to prove it.
And, now that Thanksgiving is over...I can really enjoy Christmas....and I have a long standing tradition of taking WAY TOO MANY pictures at Christmas...