Thanksgiving, being the middle child of holidays that it is, occasionally gets overlooked. Between its creepy brother Halloween and flashy sister Christmas, poor Thanksgiving sometimes becomes nearly an afterthought. However, since I am fond of gorging with family, I’ve never been guilty of such neglect.
Wendy unveiled the mysteries of crust formation.
Thanksgiving provides an excellent excuse to spend hours preparing from-scratch dishes and reminiscing with relatives. One or two of you may recall that last year I vowed to bake homemade piecrusts this Thanksgiving and I’m happy to report that I made it so. My friend Wendy graciously showed me her crust secrets and I, in return, tutored her on the correct way to make some Southern fillings. Thanks to Wendy’s wise teachings, I made French coconut pie, frozen lemonade pie and my standard sweet-potato pie entirely from scratch this year. Who’s the pie master?
Here’s the proof that I did indeed create my own crusts.
Our Thanksgiving began earlier than normal this time with us donning Mayflower attire and racing around the Thanksgiving Point golf course in the Pilgrim Run. It was a pretty frigid morning but the “historical” wears were quite hilarious and worth facing the gnawing winter for.
I hope the pilgrims didn’t look this ridiculous coming off the Mayflower.
Holiday sneer?
The rest of our day was spent with our families in the usual chaotic fashion. Between games of Rise of Augustus and animated discussions about Black Friday strategies, the day was gone remarkably fast leaving fond memories and too-full bellies in its hectic wake.
Not all of my family was around for Thanksgiving dinner but plenty were present.
Thanksgiving, you may be doomed to be forgotten between the hordes of costumed kids pursuing candy and the scourges of savage shoppers seeking Christmas, but I vow to always honor you with an endless offering of pies and what feels like an endless amount of family bonding.
It was my turn to host my Bunco group last month. I decided that Girls Rock would be my theme this time, a celebration of all things girly. Since I’m particularly passionate about the power of women, this motif seemed not only fun but fitting.
I arranged thirteen vases of flowers of varying style and size for this affair.
I, along with my helpful assistant Jason, made fresh-squeezed lemonade, various types of cookies, phyllo-wrapped asparagus and a classy cheese platter for this event. These freshly prepared treats were supplemented with delicious cake bites from The Sweet Tooth Fairy. I made sure all the victuals were presented with the frills and fanciness that the theme demanded.
I decorated red velvet cookies with swirls of cream cheese frosting, dusting sugar and pansies made out of icing.
All the ladies went home with a vase of flowers.
But sugar-crusted sweets and mint-garnished drinks weren’t enough in themselves to create a woman wonderland. I built a playlist with all the girly standards from Alanis Morissette to Avril Lavigne, plus a few of my offbeat personal favorites, so my halls could be filled with the sounds of rockin’ femininity.
This was just one of the many bouquets I put together.
I also decided to cover my house with bouquets of flowers, as if the girly refreshments and racquet weren’t enough. Floral arranging is a hobby of mine so I may have taken this portion of my plan a bit overboard. I packed thirteen vases with a variety of blooms and let my guests each pick one to take home with them.
I made sure the spread didn’t disappoint on the girly scale.
Bunco was stuffed with ruffles, blossoms and pinkness. And, more importantly, it was filled with the laughter of intelligent ladies exchanging ideas and enjoying each other’s company, which speaks more to the success of the evening than any overabundance of cheese or flowering vegetation ever could.
Jason and I just held our annual Halloween bash. As always, it was a tremendous undertaking. The planning for this event usually begins sometime in August and escalates as it approaches. Thinking of putting on a Halloween shindig of your own? May our terrifying process convince you that that would only be lunacy. Every year is a little different but here are the 26 steps that were required to produce and recover from our festivities this time:
1. Create and order invites. 2. Buy prizes for the costume contest, bingo and various other games with all ages considered. 3. Order costume contest medals.
Jason and I went steampunk this year.
4. Buy fabric and sew costumes. One sentence doesn’t seem adequate to represent the work involved in this. Good thing I just made it three. 5. Tag and decorate 48 bottles of butterscotch beer as party favors for the adults. 6. Buy a piñata and its fillings. Stuff it. 7. Arrange for food. This year’s sustenance came in the form of catering from Waffle Love. They brought their delicious waffles, and waffle truck, to us.
I don’t even want to acknowledge how long it took me to tag and decorate these 48 party favors.
Silas dressed as a possessed doll and played the part quite creepily.
8. Buy supplies for the kids’ craft table. 9. Build a custom playlist with all those Halloween favorites and some lesser-known creepy beats. 10. Buy kiddie goodie-bags plus an assortment of innards and cram them all in. This year we put together almost 40 of these bags and all but a few were given out. 11. Address and mail invites.
What a darling family.
12. Gussy up costume contest prizes with ribbons, feathers, eyeballs and anything else bumpy in the night. 13. Prep craft table by constructing examples of all the finished products so that the little folk will know what they’re trying to make. 14. Go to a patch and handpick pumpkins. Paint these pumpkins black and white so guests can decorate them with chalk and decals. All this jack-o business took way too long so don’t expect it to happen again next year.
Never underestimate the eeriness the right lighting can add to a scene.
Eden took undead to the animals with her zombie cat costume.
15. Create costume contest ballots. 16. Buy utensils, plates, napkins, drinks and all those other eating niceties. 17. Move couches, rugs, kitchen appliances, pictures, etc. upstairs or into the garage, anywhere they are out of the way.
Drew and Simone came as Dr. Who?
18. Vacuum, dust and straighten the basement. Everything has to be tucked away somewhere to make room for the people explosion that’s about to occur. 19. Decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, decorate, and decorate. I feel like I should say “decorate” a few dozen more times because decorating is a monster of a job. We meticulously arrange creepy cloth, candlesticks, bones, potion bottles, pumpkins, lights, ravens and so forth throughout our yard and two floors of our home. Every year we display our extensive Halloween collection differently and every year gallons of creative juices get consumed in the process.
These serving-dish fingers may be proof of a twisted mind…mine.
This graveyard scene was my design.
20. Arrange studio lights and a background to form a makeshift photo spot. I didn’t have a clue how to work and situate studio lights before this little experiment. It took some messing around and research to figure it out. 21. Rent space heaters so that the backyard can be a toasty hangout location.
Thirty-one feet of ruffles were squished into the back of this skirt.
22. Clean. Everything has to be spick ‘n span before it’s thrown into chaos. It’s a lot like nursing a patient back to health before serving out their death sentence. 23. Throw party!
Waffle Love catered our party via their food truck.
Penny’s no garden-variety gnome.
24. Clean up the raspberries smashed into the sidewalk, the sticky goo left on the kitchen floor, the blob of who-knows-what dripped on the carpet. Cleanup is lengthy and not especially fun. 25. Put relocated furnishings back where they came from. 26. Pack away the dozens of boxes of Halloween décor so that they are ready for the vicious cycle to begin all over again next year. (This step has not yet been completed and will still take us weeks.)
Bart and Brandi cleverly used a bulging belly to their advantage and came as Juno and Bleeker.
Too many steps for you to follow? Not to worry, you can come to the Sabin party and enjoy all the fun and fright without rattling your work bones. So why do we do it? The obvious answer is that we are crazy but, besides that, we love Halloween and conjuring the spooky magic of the season up for the wee ones. We also enjoy reminding adults that costumes aren’t just for kids.
I made sure this jar was crawling with centipedes. The gruesome details are never overlooked by yours truly.
This year we had considerably more help pulling this madness off than we’ve had in the past. Many thanks to Lee and Jacob for lending us a hand with basement prep one evening. Keith, thanks for the pickup service. A big thank you to Drew, Adam, Jacob and Lee for helping the kids bowl and Jenny and Simone for assisting with some of the other games. And muchas gracias to the various people that collected many of the cups and craft fragments scattered throughout our house: Abigail, Simone, Drew, Adam and Jeremy. Since Jason and I are a tiny team, any bit of assistance from others goes a long way. Maybe we aren’t quite mad yet…
Recent Comments