Any suggestions for leftover tofurkey?

I loathe the holiday season....

I don't ruin it for other people. I can fake it with the best of them, and having kids make it better, but I really am not into the holidays. I really never have been. My husband, along with a couple of my other beaus in the past have been complete Christmas junkies....listening to Christmas carols as soon as freakin Halloween is over. This is lunacy, however, I deal. I get on with my life, make it fun for the kiddos, and avoid the radio stations that play all the holiday crap until February.

I don't remember quite when the holidays lost their magic for me. I know that I enjoyed Christmas as a kid, as most children do. I believed in Santa Claus forever. I even remember asking my mom that if I still be lieved in Santa when I was 15, would he still come visit me.... I was always assured that as long as I believed in Santa, he would visit me. The spirit of that is beautiful. My father was into the holidays, and always helped people whenever he could. When I was around 11 or so, he took my sister and me to visit this needy family to deliver them food and toys for Christmas. They were heating their house with their oven. The oven was on full blast and the door to it was wide open. I felt so sorry for that family, and so fortunate that I was in such a warm house with plenty of food and toys. I have tried to do something in that fashion every year since.

This have kinda changed since I've had kids. Having children around the holidays is cool, because I remember how much I loved getting together with my family. Thanksgiving and Christmas was the only time that I got to see my father's family. We would all meet at one person's house, and it was a pot luck, so we had certain dishes to look forward to every year, like Aunt Joyce's deviled eggs with the perfect amount of paprika, and Nancy's strawberry cake. My dad was known for his sausage biscuits. We all would gather together and visit for a while before eating, and before the meal, my dad, being the eldest male, would always say something about the particular holiday and then ask the blessing. Even later when my beliefs changed from my father's, I still appreciated what it meant to everyone else, and realized how precious these times were. As a mother, I want my children to have the same fond memories of the holidays.

Yesterday, it was all about the presentation. My sister in law is a wonderful hostess. She has a lot of money, and a beautiful house in the Philadelphia posh suburbs. Yesterday, she was expecting 16 people for Thanksgiving, so she decided to rent tables and chairs and use her dining room table as a buffet. This worked out well. She did most of the cooking, as she usually does - and does extremely well, I might add - and a few people brought desserts. I was really making an effort for my children and my husband to make the day wonderful and memorable. I know that the whole thing about what the settlers eventually did to the Native Americans was horrible, but that is NOT what Thanksgiving is about.

The night before Thanksgiving, at church, we were given loaves of bread with a prayer attached. The idea was to break the bread and pass it to everyone around the room and then say the prayer for the blessing before the meal. I asked my hubby to help me accomplish this, thinking people would listen to him more, since the majority of the people were his family, the exception being my mother and her fiance' and my sister-in-law's friend and her husband and son. Anyway, the food was all out on the table, and everyone was gathering, and my mother-in-law was making a plate for my father-in-law already because he hadn't been feeling well. My husband began to try to say something about the bread and about that time my sister-in-law started going off about how everyone should be getting the food because GOD FORBID it not be piping hot on your plate, and so everyone disregarded what my husband was saying and started to get their food...which probably shouldn't have upset me. I just feel like I have enough trouble as it is, not liking holidays and getting all sad about my dad and about missing my friend's back home, the LEAST they can do is try and help me make this day a little different from all the other for my children's sake. I want them to look back on holidays and remember family traditions and seeing people, not getting together and eating while it's hot and then having dessert and then going home. It was just like another day for them, sans the extra folks.

So the whole bread thing upset me, and I tried to not show it, and I may not have to everyone, but that's okay. It's over now, and I tried. Now they want to do Christmas Pollyana style. I don't like this idea, but that's another blog for another day.

Happy Tofurkey day.....