Ah, I always get that Fiddler on the Roof song stuck in my head around this time of the year.

Matt and Aubri are home again, but this time for the entire week. So, the house is quite full and very festive! Aubri’s been helping me with Mason and I took all the children to the store last night to buy our Thanksgiving feast supplies. Zach and Matt, when not working, have been holed up in Zach’s room playing video games. The girls have been downstairs planning the menu and watching The Food Channel, which has now taught us how to cook turkey in ways we’d have never thought of before! We are, of course, keeping everything entirely traditional.

Ali’s peace of mind depends on tradition. Everything has to be the same, year after year, for all holidays. If anything changes, she gets VERY upset, which is understandable. A few years ago, when Ali was 10 years old, we celebrated Thanksgiving at Richard’s sister’s house in Wisconsin. They cut up the turkey in the kitchen before the meal, instead of at the table. Ali started crying when she saw it. 🙁

Our traditional Thanksgiving wakes us up early on Thursday to eat coffee cake, drink hot chocolate with extra marshmallows and candy canes draped on the mug, and watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Then, the guys disappear, lest they be solicited for kitchen duty! The girls spend the entire day cooking while the guys watch the little ones. We feast and then I help the children do the dishes because I feel so guilty about wrecking the kitchen.

As I stated last week, we’re having guests for Thanksgiving this year. We’ve never needed a kids’ table before, but it looks like we’ll definitely need one this year.

On Friday, we’ll go buy our tree at the local Christmas Tree farm. After we get the tree, my friend, Gail, and I are going shopping while Richard and the children spend a couple of hours trying to get the tree straight. Ha ha. I won’t miss that frustration this year! When I get home on Friday afternoon, we’ll pull all the Christmas decorations out of the attic, and will deck the halls. That’s my favorite part! Aubri and Matt are going to help with the outside lights this year. That’s good, because when it’s really cold, you can’t feel your hands when you’re stringing lights, and you can’t wear gloves because then it’s too hard to get the wires around the pins on the fence with anything other than your bare hands.

After dark, we’ll settle in for a simple dinner, like pizza or lasagna, and more hot chocolate, and then our tradition of huddling in the living room to watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and laughing like we haven’t seen it a dozen times before.

It’s quite cold. It was in the 20’s this morning when we got up. We haven’t had any snow yet and it’s been almost balmy until this week. At least now it feels like Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, we are most thankful for our health, especially after Mason’s hospitalization earlier this year. We no longer take our good health for granted. We’re also thankful for all the good friends we’ve met and continue to meet through WritersWeekly each year. You don’t know how nice it is to receive friendly emails every single day from my writer friends, whether they business-related, a personal note, or just a howdy.

This week’s issue is abbreviated due to the holiday. We want to wish all of our U.S. subscribers a wonderful Thanksgiving and the rest of you a joyous beginning of the holiday season!

This week’s Maxism:

The other day, Max asked, “What’s for dinner tonight?”

I replied, “Chicken.”

He made a face and said, “You don’t feel like cooking tonight, Mommy. We need to order pizza.”

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYBODY!

Ang

P.S. Want to read real query letters that landed these contracts? Woman’s Day – $2,800; Redbook – $3,500; Ladies Home Journal – $3,000; DiscoveryHealth.com – $2,000; Lifetime Magazine – $3,000; Life Extension Magazine – $6,480; Natural Remedies – $11,300; and many more! See: https://www.writersweekly.com/books/1409.html