Well, my friends, I hope you all had a delightful Thanksgiving. I, personally had a very different day than I'm used to, but I am learning that this is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'll start by describing a typical Thanksgiving for me...
<Many of you know my family, so sorry for the quick history lesson for my other blog readers>
I was extremely blessed to have grown up with essentially my ENTIRE extended family (well, on my mom's side, my dad is an only child) within minutes of me. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were all within about 20 minutes of where I lived with my parents. Even now, as adults, everyone but me lives within about an hour of each other. There are 9 grandkids in all, so that's already a pretty big crowd, and now we've started adding in spouses/significant others and even kids of our own (well only my sister Alecia has those for now), so we have anywhere from 15-25 people on a given holiday.
We usually do Thanksgiving at my parents' house (Christmas is at my grandparents'). I always wake up early in the morning, turn on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and pretend to help my mom in the kitchen while sneaking away every chance I get to watch the TV (don't worry, I record it and watch the parts I miss later). The family starts coming around 2:00, and it gets real loud real quick. We are just a loud family, there's no getting around it. We love to talk to each other and play games and yell at the football game on TV, it's just what we do. Thanksgiving is a wonderful, LOUD, delicious day in my family.
This year, I knew it wasn't really going to be feasible for me, financially or otherwise, to come home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. So I opted to take some time off at Christmas and spend Thanksgiving here in New York.
Back in October, when Sara and I knew we were both going to be here for Thanksgiving, we thought it wise to do a dry run, a test drive if you will, basically to make sure we didn't suck at making all the Turkey Day delicacies we had "helped" make all these years. Sara had done this last year and dubbed it "Fakesgiving," so we decided to officially make it a yearly event and set about planning it. We bought all of the essentials and invited our closest friends over to partake in this unofficial holiday. I think 2010's Fakesgiving consisted of 4 people at our old apartment in Glendale...this year, we had SEVENTEEN people in our tiny little apartment. We didn't even have enough seats so we had to get creative. Check it out:
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| Good Food & Good Friends |
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| Friends from my Apostles community group |
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| Nothing wrong with eating picnic-style on the floor :-) |
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| Amazing friends that I get to work with every day |
Despite the "coziness" of having all those people in our apartment, it was one of my favorite New York moments to date. Having friends from all of the areas of our lives...co-workers, high school friends, college friends, Apostles friends...it was amazing and we felt so thankful (forgive the pun) to have everyone together for a delicious pre-Thanksgiving get-together.
Our real Thanksgiving was a little more low-key. I didn't get up and turn on the parade, I got up and actually went to the parade!! Although the real thing requires getting up a LOT earlier and being a LOT colder than watching it from my parents couch, it was still pretty cool to see it in person. I try not to double up too much between my blog and Facebook, so check out my Facebook if you want to see the whole parade album, but here are a few of my favorites:
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| To Infinity...And Beyond! |
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| Kung Fu Panda |
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| Snoopy |
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| Straight No Chaser...you should all know them if you took my advice a few blog posts ago and bought their Christmas albums. One of my all-time favorite groups!! |
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| The star of the show, Santa himself |
After we thawed out from the parade and took a quick nap, we prepared all the food and our friends started arriving. This time there were only 7 of us - Sara and I plus our friends Andrew, Audrey, Allison, Angie (What's with all the A names??), and Whitney. We ate and hung out and ate and ate some more....
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| Andrew, Allison, Sara, Whitney, Me |
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| Yum! |
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| Sooo many desserts! |
It was a truly enjoyable and relaxing Thanksgiving, and though I obviously missed my family, it was fun to start some new traditions up here. Plus, I got to Skype in with the whole family while they were all together, so it was almost like being there myself. :-)
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Alex (and any of my other Scrooge-like friends), you can stop reading here...
So, it's really starting to look and feel like Christmas here. The weather has been absolutely beautiful, but it's definitely starting to get chilly. All the stores are decorated and there are about 2-3 times the normal amount of tourists (the only downside to this wonderful time of year, haha).
My friend Skip and I actually went ice-skating in Bryant Park on our lunch break the other day. I haven't been ice skating in years, so that was interesting. And Skip is from Maine, that's all I'm gonna say about that. He actually got in trouble (several times) for skating too fast. Haha. I did NOT get in trouble for skating too fast, that's for sure. But I also didn't fall on my butt, so that's something.
Another very touristy thing I did this week was checking out the store windows. For those of you who don't know, a big tradition here is that the major department stores in Manhattan (i.e. Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, Saks, Barney's...) go all out and decorate their windows for the holidays. It's a pretty big deal - they have to rope off the sidewalk in front of the windows so the gawkers don't get in the way of the rest of the sidewalk traffic.
Anyway, I got off work early on Monday, so I walked like 40 something blocks up 5th Avenue and checked them all out. Pretty amazing stuff.
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| Macy's |
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| Lord & Taylor |
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| I don't even know what store this is |
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| Trump Tower |
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| Bloomingdale's |
And best of all, today after work I ventured over to Rockefeller to see this bad boy...
And take a real good look, because I will not be going anywhere near Rockefeller/Times Square/etc until after New Year's. No, seriously. Tonight I made the mistake of walking down 50th as one of the Rockettes' shows was letting out and literally was stuck for 25 minutes on ONE BLOCK. I couldn't move because there were people shoved in all around me. If I was more claustrophobic, I probably would have had a panic attack, but I survived.
Alright, well that's all I got for now, but I'm sure there will be more Christmas in New York goodness to come. Sorry, Scrooges.
Happy Friday!
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