Holiday Spirit

What an exciting time of year. The first snow has already fell and the Holiday spirit is in my home. All right, I started a little. Last week I took out my grandmother's porcelain Christmas Tree and I took out some nutcrackers just to dress the house up. I find when I need a little pick me up a change of scenery always helps. And now the scenery outside my front window has changed so I am ready for the holidays. The first question: what do we do for Thanksgiving? Tradition was for the girls to spend the night at mom's, then I go to mom's early for coffee with my sister and help get things ready. Hang out for the day, eat and clean up and take off in the evening. Last year, obviously that changed. With Dad no longer around Mom wants to be anywhere but home. Kristina, Kathleen, Jeff and I spent a quite little Thanksgiving home. It was terrible lonely and there was no feeling of Thanksgiving. None of us can go through that again. So we started scoping out our options. It is tough to invite yourself to Thanksgiving dinner and even tougher we when have to be home by 5 because Max's mom will have him home then. The closer it is coming to Thanksgiving the more apprehensive we all became. Truth is we really did not want to spend the day with someone else's family, we wanted our own back. Jeff then suggested going out to eat, which the girls and I snarled at. It seemed so impersonal and "un-holidayish" to go out to dinner. After a few days of talking about it we started to like the idea of finding a buffet in a nice restaurant in the area and just enjoying each other. I figure I could throw a turkey breast in the oven and some stuffing and gravy so we have some left overs and make some pies so when we come home we could have dessert. The idea has not only grown on us, but we are looking forward to it. Holidays will never be the same and instead of getting down about it we need to change things around a bit to keep our spirit alive. We will figure Christmas out when Thanksgiving is over.