Thanksgiving ~ Do What You Can Do

 Happy Thanksgiving from our house to yours.  It is such a lovely holiday, so full of good things.

I wanted to write and make a confession....I make fake Thanksgiving dinner.  Yup...fake.  I am a perfectionist by birth and it is something I fight all the time.  God decided to try His very best to cure me of this terrible scourge with a few brain surgeries, a couple incurable diseases, a bunch of hardware and devices in this old body and the loss of much of my intelligence. 

After all that you'd think I would be nice and humble huh? Ummmm nope.  I try but it's sort of like pedaling a stationary bike I'm afraid!  What I did learn were limits. Limits on everything.  I learned that doing something is better than doing nothing even if it isn't perfect.  Hence the fake Thanksgiving dinner that I am finally comfortable with and proud of.

I  have always attempted the Hallmark commercial holidays with all the trimmings, but my physical health won't allow some of it anymore.  I am fortunate that I have a house full of males and they really don't even see the details which we gals work so hard at getting....perfect.  This is truly a blessing though because they are happy with anything I create for the holidays as long as there are few vegetables involved.   The family just likes to be together, play games, laugh, give one another a hard time, throw the football and watch "It's A Wonderful Life"while eating pie.

So why write about this?  Because I have joined those out there who are just getting by and want it all to be lovely anyway. 

I Cheat.....
I cook a very large turkey because we have a very large family. I use those turkey bags because my mom used those turkey bags and the bird comes out moist every time.  I do very little to the turkey except rub his outsides with butter which is what my mother in law has always done.  Can you tell I value tradition?  I never put the stuffing in the turkey because my mom has made me a little paranoid about making folks sick if it wasn't cooked properly.....besides I cheat with the stuffing.

My stuffing is good ol' Stove Top Turkey Stuffing because it literally takes maybe 5 minutes to prepare.  It does take a bit longer on Thanksgiving though because I first fry up mild Italian sausage, then add the water, butter and breading mix.  Even with that addition it's still only about 10 minutes.  I then put a couple cans of corn into a sauce pan and heat. Maybe 5 minutes??  The mashed potatoes are Hungry Jack Instant Potatoes....yup...instant potatoes.  It gets even worse....canned gravy.  Then I slide the cranberry sauce out of the can, heat the ready made rolls in the oven and we're good to go!  I do use my best linens, goblets, silver and lovely serving pieces.  We always have candles on the table and music in the background.

I'd say excluding the turkey time, it takes 20-30 minutes to make Thanksgiving dinner here. I should/did feel bad that I don't make everything from scratch but compared to a few years ago when I couldn't even do the cheater dinner, I am a 4 star chef !!

We also make cheater pies. Frozen or ready made crusts, canned pie filling, blah, blah, blah.  I add my own little things to them to make them a bit more home made, but again, the family doesn't seem to notice. Thank You God.

 I have finally learned to be thankful for the ability to make things the easy way, the cheater way, any way at all. I have a friend who has her own take on an old cliche, "If a job is worth doing it's worth doing half way".  That is SO hard for a perfectionist.  But it's ultimately healthy when you have any sort of disability or have had a baby, surgery, a crisis, etc. 

So if you did not make your stuffing from scratch or your pies from scratch or your potatoes from scratch....maybe you used the time to play board games with the kids or sat and listened to an elderly relative. There are precious things out there waiting for our time and traditional or not, my cheater Thanksgiving makes those things possible for me.

~Grateful on Thanksgiving~
Lisa