Turkey Day in England

We had a great Thanksgiving dinner on Friday night with friends Bart and Jessica Geiser and their friends Craig and Dannette Dunn who were visiting from Arkansas. Bart and Jessica's baby boy Caine and Maddie's friend Ann rounded out our table. Naturally everyone ate too much food and there was still much left over. I think I calculated pounds per person for the turkey, but turkeys in the UK are weighed in kilogram, so there was about twice as much turkey as we actually needed. We also had an overabundance of desserts. I received raves on my pecan pie, but I finally had to come clean and tell everyone it's just the recipe on the back of the dark Karo syrup bottle.

Right after we finished eating at about 6 p.m. on Friday evening, the Christmas tree that I purchased on Tuesday was delivered. Our guests thought we were terribly efficient to have our tree delivered at the exact time we finished Thanksgiving dinner.

We had traditional English Christmas crackers for each person. (I should have taken pictures!) When you cracked them open there was a bell in each one. Each bell was a different color and had a number. There was music included and so when dinner was over, we had our own little handbell choir and attempted to play several Christmas carols. If only we had a video camera!

Today, Maddie's friend Ann had her birthday party, so I took both the girls back to Ann's house and her parents took the girls to the party and then Maddie came back to their house to play for awhile. That let Skip and me have some time to do some Christmas shopping. Then we spent about an hour visiting and drinking tea with Ann's parents when we went to pick Maddie up. It was a really nice day. A cold day, but a nice one.