weekend worship

fresh cranberries from the fraser valley

Jeff and I are preparing for our annual Thanksgiving Potluck, so this will be a very short post, but I just wanted to take a minute to talk about this dinner that's emerging as quite a tradition for us. It began when we lived in Vancouver in 2002. My friend (and co-worker) Rosie and I, along with Jeff and a few other key people, managed to pull of a dinner for 27 (!) in a kitchen with about a metre of counter space. (Do you remember this, Rosie?) My most vivid memory is of her and I instinctually moving around each other in the tiny kitchen, yelling "look out, hot behind you!", keeping food on top of the fridge and in the bathtub (gross, but we were young), and somehow squeezing everyone into our living room (where did we find plates and cutlery for such a feast?). This amazing dinner was marred only by a chair collapsing beneath one of our guests (thus we discovered why it was in an alley in the first place) and we have gone on to repeat such astonishing acts of cookery many times since then.

Subsequent Thanksgiving dinners have brought us together with friends old and new, both here in Vancouver and in Calgary. We have had some seriously good times at these get togethers and have consumed wine by the gallon. Last Thanksgiving we had about 15 people in our now slightly larger apartment and highlights included guests allowing my dog to eat from the table (but drawing the line at their plates) and our friend Mark cooking a turkey for everyone. We are looking forward to another wonderful dinner and want to express how thankful we are for all of our friends: those that will be here tonight, those who were here in years past, and those that we don't see often enough! And happy birthday to my friend Marigold!

no time for homemade pies this year!

take that, turkey! mark's masterpiece (after) 2009