Happy & Blessed Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to get together with family and friends to reflect & be grateful for all the wonderful blessings that God has given each of us. This year, I’m off the hook on cooking and we will be going to my hubby’s dad’s side of the family in Montgomery for Thanksgiving Day and then on Friday, we’ll head over to Atlanta to celebrate with my family. Oh, the food we’ll eat. It will all be delicious and fattening and oh, so yummy.

Just wanted to leave you with some beautiful pics that my friend, Maureen, posted over on her blog, Penchants, Ponderings, & Posies. Maureen recently visited Nell Hill’s, which is one of Mary Carol Garrity’s shops, out in Kansas & took some beautiful inspirational pictures that you will all love. If you click on the link, you can find her photo albums & take a look at a lot more of them. She’s got a great eye for these things & always shares her gorgeous pics with us & she graciously allowed me to borrow a few of them for this special day. So, enjoy the eye candy! Mo & I share a love for decorating & started out as online friends, when we were both living in Atlanta. Now, we are friends in real life & try to get together whenever we can & since we both love to tour showhouses, that seems to be something that we make a point to try to do whenever possible. Beautiful place settings. I believe that all of these were taken inside Mary Carol Garrity’s home. I have really enjoyed the Mary Carol book that my sweet friend, Manuela, sent me recently. I have poured over all the beautiful pics to glean some new inspiration for Christmas this year…and there is plenty there to be inspired over. Mary Carol puts together the most inspiring tablescapes & vignettes, which always amaze me.
Pears are a favorite of mine too & she’s used these very cleverly. I’ve got some ideas this year for all my pears too.

One of my faithful readers, Amy, who lives in Maryland recently emailed me about Southern cooking for Thanksgiving and asked me what sort of things my family cooks. So, I shared a few things that my family usually has on Thanksgiving. I’m sure many families down South have different traditions that they carry on. We always have turkey & usually ham too. My mom will make many different vegetables, like Ford Hook lima beans, green beans, maybe creamed corn out of her freezer, we always do sweet potato casserole with the brown sugar & pecans on top, sometimes mashed potatoes & ham gravy. We have one dish that we all like since it was introduced in the family a few years ago & it is a pineapple & cheese casserole. It has lots of butter & flour so it bakes up all cheesy & it’s really good. Something about that combo really is great & it’s a nice side to ham. None of our stuff is low-fat though! We usually have some sort of festive green salad, maybe with pecans & mandarin oranges or dried cranberries. There are lots of good salad recipes out there. And my mom started making a congealed cranberry salad many years ago that we all love & it has apples, pineapple, whole cranberry sauce & walnuts in a jello mixture. It’s a great side dish for all the other things. We always, always make it & it’s great left over as a snack too. Usually have some sort of yeast rolls and at least a cake and pie. Mom always mixes that up a lot, as she has a lot of cakes & pies that she makes from year to year.

Oh, and the most important things to most Southerners at Thanksgiving is the dressing. Southern dressing is always made with cornbread. Don’t ask me how to make it, cause I don’t have a clue. My mom always makes it & I don’t absolutely love dressing (I’d rather have the other carbs!), so I don’t eat a lot of it, but it’s got chicken broth, giblets, & is based on broken up cornbread, celery, sage, lots of stuff in it. That’s the traditional Southern dressing. I know Northerners make it a lot different than we do.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving Day with family and friends. I sure am thankful for all that the good Lord has done for me & my family! I’m finished with all the furniture painting, so I’ll be sharing those projects very soon.