Thanksgiving Eve

Today is Thanksgiving Eve! I LOVE this day each year, when I know the next morning will be spent watching the parade, with all of the wonderful smells of wafting out from the oven. Thankfully our family uses a deep pit to cook our turkey. Which means, all I have to do it prep it! If you are unfamiliar with a deep pit (which I was before I moved to California over 10 years ago), it is a deep hole in the ground, lined with bricks on all sides. My husband, his dad, and their friends who decide to deep pit their turkey that year burn wood in the pit starting around dinner time. It isn't ready to put the turkeys in until almost midnight, with enough coals to cook all of the turkeys. The turkey are wrapped twice in turkey bags, then wrapped in two layers of foil, then wrapped in a burlap sack, then wrapped with wire, which acts as the "handle" to get the turkey in and out of the pit. When they drop them in, they also put cactus leaves in the pit before covering them up, for the moisture. The result is, the next day you pull out your turkey and you had better put the bag in a BIG dish because there is SO much juice and the meat literally falls off the bone. Anyway, back to MY part of this traditional night...Years ago, before we were married, I used to freeze my buns off outside with them, burning wood by the fire, with Brandon's old German Shepherd, Coyote, by our side. Once we had kids, obviously there was no way we were going to have our babies freezing outside, so I have had to stay inside with them. In the years since, I have started my own, "perfectly lonely" tradition. I watch It's a Wonderful Life all by myself. Each year I try to get the kids to watch it with me but they get bored, so I put them to bed and watch it myself. I remember my mom watching this movie all through my childhood, and if she hadn't, I probably never would have seen it. When I moved away, I bought my own, and accidentally bought it in "technicolor"....yuck! I returned it and bought it in the original black and white. To me, it just wasn't the same to watch it in color. I LOVE this movie, and I even love that I watch it alone...no one to complain about it being long or boring, because they don't have the same appreciation for it as I do. If you haven't seen it, I recommend watching it before Christmas this year, in black and white if you can! =) Happy Thanksgiving Eve everyone!