I Am Thankful, Indeed!

 It is now nearly 11:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. The house is quiet, other than the occasional shout from Seth's bedroom where he and Isaiah are playing video-games. I am tired. It's a good kind of tired, the kind that comes from a full day of fun, but I'm tired nonetheless. This will be my final "thankful" post of 2013. I'm thankful for many things this day. For one, I'm thankful for sweet sister missionaries, who stopped by today just to take this photo (above) for us.

Also, after moving our Thanksgiving dinner and celebration to a different day for the past three years in order to accommodate various schedules, I'm thankful we got to have Thanksgiving on the "real" day this year. Moving the day worked out okay, and I expect we will do it again some year if need be, but this year it was just really nice to celebrate Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving. Really nice.

I'm thankful for extra help cooking! Shulamith and I always cook Thanksgiving dinner together, but today we had extra help from her baby, Swen.

I'm thankful for food that actually turned out. This doesn't happen often. See, who says Shulamith and I can't be "Mollys" if we want to?

I'm thankful for this pretty table. When you only set the table about once a year, you have to make it count.

I'm thankful for Black Friday sales, which for some reason now begin on Thursday. And yes, I realize there is quite a lot of controversy surrounding the retail industry choosing to open its doors on Thanksgiving afternoon, rather than waiting until Friday morning. How do I feel about this? I guess I wish they would wait until Friday. However, my conviction was not strong enough to keep me out of the stores today. You see, I have five children for whom I need to buy Christmas gifts, on a limited budget. And a sale is a sale is a sale! So about 5:30, Shulamith and Swen and I braved the crowds in attempt to get just a few outstanding deals. Here we are waiting outside Target in a crazy long line:

We will still go tomorrow morning, just not as early as we usually do. We will still get hot chocolate at Starbucks. We will still get breakfast at McDonald's. We just won't do these things at 6:00 a.m. We will shop and eat and laugh and shop some more. We will listen to the first noon Christmas concert of the season. It will be good. It will be very good. And it will be soon since it's now already nearly 11:30. I'd better go to sleep.

Lastly, I'm thankful to every one of you who reads my blog. It makes me happy that others enjoy what I write. Happy, happy Thanksgiving to all!