My Thanksgiving Weekend

Be it known that I will be slow cooking my turkey from here on out.  I'm telling you, it was falling off the bone tender.  I cooked it at 250' for 6 hours, but I could probably cut it back to 5.  I'll try that next year and see what the meat thermometer says.

I was so excited for Thanksgiving, that I woke up at 4:00 AM and couldn't go back to sleep.   I lay there for an hour or so, but eventually gave up and got up.  I got my turkey in the oven, and had time to watch a Thanksgiving movie before the parade started.   There is a shocking lack of Thanksgiving movies out there.  My favorite, besides Charlie Brown, of course, is one called Mayflower:  A Pilgrim's Adventure.  It was made back in 1979.  I'd had it on VHS for years, but hadn't been able to watch it since my VCR died a while back.

I finally broke down and bought a second hand VCR, and wouldn't you know it, Amazon put the movie up on Prime.  Just my luck...Oh, well, at least I can watch the un edited, un revised, un ruined original Star Wars trilogy in which HAN SHOT FIRST.

We don't do Black Friday here.  Never have.  Even when I was a kid, that was the day we baked fruitcakes.  Now that I'm grown, I start putting my Christmas decorations up.  I got this far on my tree, but that's it.

I reckon I ought to start putting ornaments on it.  Right now, all it's got is that little chainsaw my coworker gave me.  I'm starting to understand why Beverly wanted to get rid of it.  It's a lovely tree, but it's so thick, there's no where to fit stuff in.  I'm thinking in another year or two, I might get myself a new tree and pass this one on to someone else.

Once I'd gotten the lights on, I was so tired that decorating the tree just seemed a bit overwhelming.  I worked on putting the stuff in my entertainment center instead.

That book is the same edition of The Night Before Christmas that my mother read to us every Christmas Eve before we went to bed.  I found it last year in a used book shop, and was so excited to get it, I read it to the dogs.  They weren't impressed.

Last year, I had this vase filled with glass balls.

I liked the way it looked, but the ornaments were really a little too big.  While I was buying milk and bananas this afternoon, I picked up three containers of smaller, shatterproof balls.

I mixed in a couple of containers of blue and silver balls that I've had for forever but never used, and it hit the spot.  I'm not sure why the camera washed out the colors the way it did, but they really are brighter than they look.

I put all the old glass balls in a box and advertised them in the local free-bees group.  I'm going to purge a lot of the old stuff I never use any more.    There's no sense in it all sitting in a box year after year.    I've got more ornaments than I can fit onto the tree, and more stuff than surfaces to put it on, so some of it's got to go.

None of the nativity sets are going anywhere.

That's for sure. 

In the meantime, I bought a new ornament today.  Because 'Merica, that's why.

I also picked up some new cookie sheets, remembering that I had given one of mine to Cody last year.

I don't remember seeing gumdrops at Wal-mart, though.  I need them for my gumdrop cookies. 

They don't have any cherry cordial kisses, either, so I'm probably going to have to make a road trip before too much longer.

Anybody want to ride along?