thanksgiving

This was my first Canadian Thanksgiving in Canada in somewhere around 18 years.  Last year I missed it because I was in Ecuador.  I mean, I had celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving many times, but not actually in the country.  It is also the first year in probably 18 years, I am ashamed to say, that we didn't celebrate American Thanksgiving.  I am not proud of this and need to make sure to not slack off again next year!

Part of the Thanksgiving fun for me was decorating the church.  It was great….I loved doing it.  And it was very fast to do as well.  The lady in charge who asked me, asked if I needed any supplies or anything.  I asked her to get a bunch of wheat or corn stalks.  Apparently I didn't explain myself very well, and she didn't know me very well.  She came with a little bitty bundle of wheat (it was a lovely bunch of wheat but much much much too small) for me to use.  Thankfully I had called some neighbours (well, they live on the parallel court) who go to the same church and asked if we could pull up their corn stalks.  I could see their garden from our kitchen window and thought we could help each other out - we provide the labor and clean out their corn stalks and in turn we get cornstalks for decorating with! Win-win.  Oh, and by "we" I mean Eric, as far as the labor part goes.  He did almost all of the work digging out their stalks!

I also had some big pieces of weathered fence that a friend asked if I would like.  It was from her neighbour's yard.  They were perfect for the job.  Then we had a bunch of pumpkins and gourds and we were good to go.  The photos really don't do the whole thing justice, but it did look pretty great, if I do say so myself.  The only problem was that the corn stalks stank a bit so I'm sure some people weren't too thrilled about that.  Oh well.  No one died, so I'd call it successful!

(side note: the white table cloth on the communion table was the death of me - it should have not been there.  But there are certain things that you just have to smile, nod and say "okay, whatever" about)

For our actual Thanksgiving celebration, we got together at Brent and Glenda's.  I should note that these three pictures below are from the gathering with my mom.  We did of course celebrate a later Thanksgiving with my dad and Rose as well but I didn't take any pictures there.  All I really did here was take a few pathetic pictures of the birthday celebration we had pre-technical-Thanksgiving celebration.  I didn't even bring my camera.  It was rather relaxing actually.  Sometimes it is really nice to just not take pictures.

Anyway, Riley and Alex's birthdays were early October, so we celebrated them as well.

One of my contributions to the Thanksgiving meal was pie.  It often is.  I think it is mostly because I really like making pie and everyone knows it.  They are really not any better than anyone else's pies.  Especially this time around.  In fact, they were kind of disastrous.

First, the apple.  I bought this big case of apples from this guy who apparently sells fresh B.C. apples to staff and faculty at our school every fall.  I was pretty excited about it.  So I paid my fat cash and ordered a large box of Jonagold apples.  They are normally crisp, sweet-tart apples that do well baking. Well, I don't know if they mislabeled my box but the apples I received didn't look like what I normally think Jonagolds look like.  They also didn't taste what I normally think Jonagolds taste like.  And they definitely didn't have the texture that I thought Jonagolds have.  Not that I am a Jonagold or any type of apple expert.  But I could swear I received Macintoshes.  Now Macintoshes are really nice apples - for some people - but not for me.  I don't like them.  And they were such huge apples that the kids wouldn't take them to school or eat them.  So I used them for baking anyway but they did not bake well.  Kind of like how Macintoshes would bake and not how Jonagolds would bake.  Just saying…..

So I wasn't a fan of the apple pie.  They apples were pretty mushy and they turn rather grey when baked.  I also, for some inexplicable reason, put cinnamon into the pie.  I never put cinnamon in my apple pie.  I don't like cinnamon in my apple pie.  Sure, some people do, but not me.  Who knows, maybe it made it better than it would have been with the fake Jonagolds.

Can you believe I've just written this much about stupid apples and pie?  Yup.  Ridiculous.

The pumpkin pie was even worse.  But I won't rant quite as long about it.  My very wonderful and handsome grocery shopper, who is innocently ignorant about things such as canned pumpkin, bought canned pumpkin pie filling instead of plain pumpkin.  Call me a snob (many people do) but canned pumpkin pie filling is nasty.  Foul.  Gross.  You need just straight pureed pumpkin and then you add all the other stuff yourself.  THAT my friends, is essential.  But I wasn't about to throw away the stuff he had bought, and besides, it was too late, by the time I noticed, to get real pumpkin.  So the pies were made with the filling and I humbly brought them for my family to pretend to devour but to really turn their noses up at when no one was looking.  At least that's what I did.  Talk about humble pie.

The Friday prior to Thanksgiving I helped in the grades 1 and 2 split class at the school where I work.  They were having a pumpkin day - weighing, measuring, testing pumpkins to see if they floated, etc.  Then they also cut them opened, took out their guts and counted the seeds in each.  I then offered to (looking back, it was somewhat foolish!) roast all the seeds for the class and bring them back all sugared and spicy, for them to snack on.  

Most of those pumpkins had over 500 seeds in them and there were 20 pumpkins - so you can see there were a lot of seeds to roast!  Well, I did it and they were thrilled and I even kept a bunch for us.   Goodness knows that they weren't going to eat them all!