21 diners, 4mason jars, manageable leftovers

We celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving yesterday. If you'd like to read the recap of last year, click here. I will re-read it later so as not to influence this post.

This year we had 21 diners. Dave, Me, Emma, Arron (Emma's BF), Dan (Emma and Arron's friend from Rutgers), Kt, JL, Meg, Pete, Nathan, Tom, Jill, Amy, Cara, Bippy, Kim, Robbie, Xte, Amanda, Erin and Samih (Erin's friend). We managed to sit at two tables; one in the dining room and one in the family room. (Thank you to Tom and Jill & Co. for the extra tables and chairs). It really is nice to have a sit down dinner. Any more people though (and that's just fine with me) and we will have to consider buffet style.

Dinner consisted of all the tyipcal Thanksgiving trimmings and everyone contributed something which was really nice and made the day go much smoother. In the past I've resisted letting anyone bring stuff, preferring to cook together, but I have to say this method was much better; there isn't enough kitchen and oven space to cook the entire meal here. So many thanks to you all!

The weather was very accomodating. It rained early in the morning and cleared up nicely after with cooler temperatures. The kids were able to go to the park. This has become an annual trek to reduce the noise level in the house for an hour or so and relieve congestion while some of the final dinner preparatoins are going on. The park visit has come to be known as Emma's job although it is a group effort of older kids coralling the younger kids. I use the term kids lightly as four of those 'kids' are over 18 this year. However, compared to the rest of us who are well over 30 and approaching 50; they are still kids. Anyway, one of these years, we adults of today will take their kids to the park. It's only fair I think.

I was worried earlier in the week if the turkey would be big enough. It was. There are just enough leftovers for a few sandwhiches and just enough other leftovers to make a meal or two this week. I made stuffing outside the turkey because we DID run out of stuffing last year and that worked out just fine. We did just barely make it in mashed potatoes, though. Yet there are worse things that could have gone wrong however.

Dave, KT, JL and I showed slides of trips this year after dinner. My apologies for ours. I did not have time to edit and that made for a longer than necessary display. At least one person (who shall remain nameless because I'm not that mean but you know who you are) fell asleep. KT's and JL's were much better organized and viewable.

Now about the mason jars. A total of four jars were returned to Jill. During the day, Jill explained to Meg how to make apple butter and store it in the jars. So the jars would not be going home with Jill afterall. However, after eveyone had left and we put chairs and tables back in place we found the four mason jars under the living room table in front of the window. Meg, I'll check the schedule and see if I can get them up to you some time soon.

One last note. I mentioned two tables. More or less it was a table of adults plus Robbie, Amy and Nathan and everyone else at the other (aka kids) table, but you can see above for the loose definition of kids. Anyway, my last chore of the evening was to vaccum. Guess which table area was more crumby after? And no, it was not all at Robbie's place in fact his was the cleanest of that table.

I'll load some pictures later. The camera is in the family room which still has sleeping college students in it. We did not take any 'group' pictures this year! Odd and a bit sad. We will have to fix that at cookies (December 19th).