Thursday, November 24, 2005

The heat is on

Fortunately, my oven decided to work this afternoon and the pumpkin pie crisis was averted. The pie is cooling, and I'm getting ready to head over to our friends' house to watch The Sound of Music with their 3 little girls. It's not exactly the same as watching Thanksgiving Day football games at home, but it'll be good to be spending the day with friends here in Basel.

The smell of pumpkin pie baking in the house has brought all sorts of wonderful holiday memories of "home" flooding to my mind. Growing up, our family (just the 4 of us-- Mom, Dad, me and my sister) always celebrated Thanksgiving up at our cabin in northern Wisconsin. Sometimes the lake would be frozen, sometimes not. Sometimes there would be snow on the ground, sometimes not. But always, every year, my Dad would put up his "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree". He would cut down a big pine branch (not even a tree) from our woods, attach it to the deck on the front of our house and decorate it with colored lights so that you could see it from across the lake. It would be there waiting for us when we came back up to the cabin for Christmas. I loved those funny little trees and the Thanksgiving memories that go along with it.

The near-crisis this morning with the oven reminds me of a more recent Thanksgiving memory. It was 1998. Kirk and I had been married just over a month. We were having our first Thanksgiving as a married couple in our first apartment in Arlington. I decided to cook the whole meal (turkey and fixins' included) even though it would just be the two of us at dinner. Halfway through cooking the turkey, the oven died. Just like that. I think all of our friends were out of town, and we couldn't figure out any other place to cook it, and we certainly couldn't call our landlord on Thanksgiving, so we had to throw out the turkey. That year we ate just fixins' for dinner (stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberries, and pumpkin pie).

For those of you out there celebrating Thanksgiving today, I wish you lots of wonderful holiday memories with your loved ones.