Okay. I couldn’t resist this picture! Happy Thanksgiving to each and every one of you!

Ours is always a tad quiet - dinner with just one of our daughters, as the others have in-law obligations, and of course the one and only son is way out on the west coast. (Never fear, though, the flight for his ten-day Christmas stay has already been booked!). We’re not going crazy with food this year as DD & I are both doing WW’s points, and while we may go a little over our marks on Thanksgiving day, we’re not looking to go on an all-out binge, either. We’ll have the turkey; our sausage stuffing recipe that’s been handed down by women in this family through the generations; mashed potatoes (I suppose I’ll have some - they’re SO hard to resist!); baked sweet potatoes (I’ll try to stick with the sweet potato, but will probably need at least a FEW bites of the mashed WHITE potatoes with gravy); green beans almondine; cranberry sauce - and I’m making us a couple of nice homemade apple pies. Maybe a pumpkin as well. I use splenda in the apple pies, which probably helps a little if not a whole lot. Maybe some slow-churned, low-fat vanilla bean ice cream with the pie. Ooooooooh. Yum. Christmas, of course, is the worst. That’s when everybody comes, and the food reaches gargantuan proportions. Too gargantuan, really, but there are plenty of people (probably 25+) to eat it.

I am missing my son - around the holidays, I’m always wishing for everybody to be close and together, and it’s so hard to adjust to my children being adult people with their own lives, in their own homes, with their own obligations. Always brings to mind “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” the starting sentences of “A Tale of Two Cities”.  I guess I just have a love/hate relationship with life in general….so many things I love about it, yet so many things I really hate, and that’s the truth. Mostly, or partly, anyway, I hate that there are CEO’s of big oil companies, big conglomerates - and their execs (and it’s not limited to oil companies, either) - who make more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime, and as a result, pay ridiculous amounts of money for things - like $500 (or more) for a lousy sweater, $1,000 for a shower curtain - and like that, own multiple homes around the world, cars, airplanes…while we have people in this country without enough to eat, and many without homes - many having to choose between heating costs and food or medicine during the winter months. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, I am thankful for what I have, thankful that I’m not homeless or hungry, but what about the people who are? AND what about the people who are reaping the profits of these artificially inflated prices for everything in this country? I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around how all this continues, and not only continues, but gets worse and worse as the time goes by. I guess it’s a good thing I’m old; otherwise I’d probably be back out there carrying picket signs and trying to right some of these obvious wrongs.

Okay, stepping off my soap box, here, and back to business as usual. I can rant with the best of them, but don’t have much to offer when it comes to solving the problems.

Gobble, gobble,

Love,

E!