Thanksgiving in Europe

Thanksgiving this year was really fun.  The days leading up to it were super stressful and exhausting, but the day itself made it mostly worth all that pain.  We decided since we didn't have any family around we should invite some of the missionaries over.  We thought we could probably have half of them over (we have 8 in our ward).  As fate would have it the Elders called Marcus a day or so after we'd talked about this.  Marcus went ahead and invited them, and told them to tell the other elders they could come too.  There is also a girl here named Abby who teaches English at a school in Madrid.  She is wonderful and babysits for us occasionally so I wanted to invite her too.  I knew I was going to have no help with this meal, but I thought, OK 5 guests, I can handle this.

My oven here is actually decent sized for Europe.  It just isn't very wide.  I can fit a cake pan in, but nothing else.  So there is no way to bake 2 things at once.  Because of that I had to spend all of Wednesday and Thursday baking.  To make things even more exciting, poor Hailey got an ear infection and wasn't sleeping well (as a result I wasn't sleeping much either), so she had to stay home from school Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  It made everything just a little harder.  Then on Wednesday afternoon I got a call from the other set of elders to confirm, then the elder slyly said, "by the way, do you know if the sisters have any plans?  Have any of the other Americans in the ward invited them over?"  (NO...No I don't know!  I'm guessing you've had more contact with them than me!)  Anyway, I told him I didn't know.  I said we could maybe have two more, but I just didn't think we had the food or capacity for all 8 of them to come.  I was actually pretty mad that this Elder tried to guilt me in to inviting them, when I was cooking every part of this meal while nursing a sick child.  (Which of course he didn't know, and he is actually a sweet kid, but at the moment I thought that was a pretty crappy thing to do to your host).  Finally, my guilt got the better of me and I gave in and told Marc he could go ahead and tell the elders to invite the sisters too.

 Fortunately it all worked out.  There were no major disasters.  It was a great meal, and I don't think we could have found 9 more grateful people to share it with.  After dinner we went around the room and all said something we were grateful for, and a couple of them got emotional about us having them over, and talked about feeling like they had family in Madrid.  It was super sweet.  I felt bad I had been such a complainer along the way, but in the end I was so happy we'd done it.  It was a fantastic Thanksgiving.  We have so much to be thankful for this year and I don't think I'll ever forget this Thanksgiving.

Since we didn't get a picture of all the food we had: Homemade rolls, Candied yams, homemade stuffing, Turkey, mashed potatoes, Salad, and for desert pumpkin cake and a caramel apple cake.

Marcus felt strongly that he needed to preserve the hot dog eating tradition we started a couple years ago in New York after seeing the Macy's Parade.  I thought it sounded awful, but Avery was all in.  I think this pre-dinner hot dog may be the reason the only food Avery really ate at Thanksgiving dinner was the whipping cream off her desert, but a fun tradition none the less.