It's official: Thanksgiving is ON!

Thanksgiving is one of the highlights of my year. Our family has built many traditions around this day and I hold many fond memories from my childhood years. This holiday has always had such special importance to me. I don't know if this is because it was always near or on my birthday in my favorite season of fall. Maybe it was the fabulous food my aunts would cook (love that dressing!) and the pimiento cheese celery sticks my mom would make. It probably had something to do with watching Dallas Cowboys football games also. And it most definitely had to do with playing BINGO at the Bristol, Texas Schoolhouse. This small community that my mom grew up in always held a fundraiser to raise money for the upkeep of the school on Thanksgiving. People would come from miles around to try to win their hand at enough BINGO rounds to win a chance to bid on these beautiful handmade quilts that the local town ladies had made. My grandmother used to be involved in the quilting years ago. The caller was the same man every year, in fact I can still hear his voice... o 64, B 14, I 21! It was so exciting to BINGO as a kid. You would collect tickets and hope that you could get enough to go to the really cool table to pick out a new toy.

After I grew up and married, we weren't able to come to Bristol every year. One year we visited Cameron's mom and Doug in Colorado. We had an awesome time seeing their new log cabin and enjoying Thanksgiving in the snow. I remember watching Shiloh eat a turkey leg as big as he was! We enjoyed other years with Cameron's dad and Janis and she would always make a yummy dressing with lots of wonderful veggies and salads. Some years Don deep fried the turkey... yummm! We played a lot of cards and enjoyed visits with Cam's extended family as well.

About 5 years back, we decided to start hosting thanksgiving at our house. We invited family and friends to join us. The first year Cameron's brother and his family came from Chicago. We had such a fun time telling the story of the pilgrims and indians with the children. We put up our tree of thanks on the wall and each added a leaf, writing our thoughts of gratitude. We send out a family photo and letters of gratitude to those in our life. We discussed new ways that we wanted to serve others throughout the coming year. We ate lots of candy corn!!

So it's quite strange now to be in a country where it's almost summer in November, there are no fall leaves and I'm not even sure if I can find a whole pumpkin or cranberries! But nonetheless, we have decided, Lord and oven willing, that we will forge ahead with this beloved holiday and host a Thanksgiving Tea and BINGO, in honor of our favorite day in a new country. We'll teach our South African friends about the American traditional story of the events surrounding that first meal. We'll share some of our traditional foods: turkey, sweet potatoes (they're white over here!), pumpkins and of course pimiento cheese celery sticks! And we'll play BINGO!!

If you have any recipe ideas for good appetizer type foods, please send them my way! I am so excited as my aunt just sent me my favorite cooking magazine over here to South Africa and it's the Thanksgiving food edition! What a blessing - thank you! Many thanks also to my friends back in the US that are sending us care packages of Thanksgiving goodies. We pray that you all will know how much this means to us! Now please pray that the South African postal service will actually get these items to us without going on strike again.

And as we add our leaves onto our tree of thanks here in South Africa, we will think of all of you.... and how blessed we are to have you in our lives. And how we look forward to that soon coming day when we will all be together, not separated by seas nor lands, but instead gathered around that most perfect Tree of Life, with the King of all the earth in a time when our faith will be turned to sight.