mason garden

Another crazy Thanksgiving has come and gone with much fanfare. As required we partied and stuffed ourselves, more than once! Here is a full account of the festivities.

If you know me then you know I enjoy planning so….I invited James family, Don & Voni and Sandy Kacey and Paul to our house for the usual dinning experience. Several days beforehand there was shopping and cleaning….and painting and sanding (it’s the only time I am motivated enough for projects, what can I say?) Starting Thursday evening we had a birthday surprise for Don. The giant balloon cupcake and singing was overshadowed by the armload of food he was hauling inside. Fortunately, we were able to enjoy another round of song while wax dripped into the 7 thin layers of heavenly chocolate mousse cake (fyi the Nugget has the BEST chocolate mousse cake, and I don’t even like cake!) To make it a little more exciting we planned a mystery game involving two traveling turkeys and  an ornament exchange. The family “traveled” across the continent from DC to L.A. while helping strangers solve riddles. The game was a hit and the ornament exchange at the end turned into a giant ornament swap.  The rest of the evening involved polishing off pie and playing Wii competitions.

To make matters more complicated James and I had lunch with my parents family before the festivities began at our place.  Here was our schedule. 9am-12pm wake-up and last minute cleaning, 12:30 head over to the Driver’s house for lunch, 3pm head home and start food prep, 4:30pm family arrives, 11:30pm family heads home, 2am to bed after checking out the people standing in front of Target. You can imagine there was no early start to Friday but we did not skimp.

Friday we started late and finally made it over to my parents house to visit more with my dad’s brother’s family. Thomas and Jimmy had gone crazy for Black Friday. They spent part of the night in a hotel next to Fry’s and then headed over at some horrible time in the morning to purchase massive flat screen tv’s. Somewhere in that story there were security people asking why they were running away from Fry’s and evasion of $$$ questions by parents. The evening ended with several rounds of golf cards, goodbyes and hugs.

Saturday we usually have lunch with James dad’s family but there complications so we enjoyed a late start. at 6pm we headed to Davis for dinner with James mom and a DMTC play, Man of la Mancha (they had a really good chocolate and coconut bar).

Sunday we cleaned up the house and did homework then headed to the theater for a showing of Bolt. The theater was empty except for another couple and we all laughed the whole time. The hamster was a crack-up!

Monday was a rude awakening after only 5 hours of sleep. Tuesday was worse with a really! rude awakening with a work question for James. This morning I woke up with a little energy but it seems to be burning up pretty quick so we’ll see how the rest of the week goes. Hope all of our friends and family had a nice Thanksgiving.