Simply Abundant Living

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Thanksgiving is steeped in tradition for many households, ours included. Traditions are something that keep us grounded and give us security…they also provide a benchmark as we go through the years keeping the same special traditions. Children, especially, seem to thrive on traditions. In our household, a new tradition can often be born from doing something ONCE that the children especially enjoyed. They have a way of doing this. Anybody else?

We have many traditions involved in our annual Thanksgiving observance. Many surround food, many surround family, many surround the preparations for this day. Here are some of the big ones:

1. Two big turkeys. Instead of one HUGE one, we roast two big ones. One in the oven and one in the roaster. They each turn out a little different and various family members prefer one or the other. We couldn’t do without either, though.
2. More food than we know what to do with. I bake and cook for days to make two kinds of stuffing, cranberries, four kinds of pie, appetizers, caramel corn, vegetables, cider…any traditional Thanksgiving dish you can imagine. There *must* be enough leftovers to repeat the Thanksgiving meal several times, also. That is a RULE.
3. Thanksgiving decorations. We break these out in the beginning of November. Pilgrims, turkeys…the works.
4. Thanksgiving crafts…lots of them! A new one each day…and these add to our Thanksgiving decor around the house.
5. A new Thanksgiving movie that no one has seen yet. This year, I believe the kids have voted for “Ice Age 3.”
6. A Thanksgiving performance. The kids all play instruments and we sit and listen to them play their best pieces after dinner.
7. Thanksgiving parades in the morning while the turkey begins to fill the house with delicious aromas.
8. A family parlor game around the table after the meal is over and while people are digesting.
9. A “blessing tree” which is really just a stick inserted into a container full of sand. We make autumn-colored paper leaves for the tree and everyone writes what they are thankful for on the leaves. The leaves are then attached to the tree with twine for a “blessing tree.”
10. Charlie Brown Thanksgiving – need I say more? Must watch this every year! We have raised our kids with the good sense to appreciate Charles Schultz (LOL).

Please share your traditions! We are always looking to add more to our collection!

Have you studied your face lately? I mean…really studied it? I’ll prepare you…if you are anywhere near 40, you probably won’t be entirely jazzed about what you see when you take a moment to really study your face.

But then…you need to consider all of the experiences and wisdom you have added along with those wrinkles. Wrinkle cream may ease those tiny lines…but it cannot take away the hard earned lessons you’ve learned over the years. It cannot steal from you the memories that make you who you are today.

I know the wrinkles are not all that pleasant to find…but they are hard-earned. The laugh lines speak volumes about a happy and content life. The worry lines are a testament to the hard times you’ve survived. Consider the wrinkles a road map and an outline of…YOU!

My college-freshman son just made a splurge that he is rather proud of. After extensive shopping among many different laptops, he finally settled on a Dell that was delivered last week. This is especially important to him because he earned and bought this laptop with his own money. He had it built to his specifications and it even has a Brewers Baseball outer shell that makes it especially “him.”

I’m proud of him. He earned this!

Do you serve sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving? I am about to share with you…THE.BEST recipe I have ever found for sweet potatoes. It’s all in the spices…so I am also letting you in on my little spice secret. It’s called Penzey’s Spices and I purchase quite a lot of my spices from this store.

Anyway…if you like sweet potatoes, you’re gonna love this!

* 2 lbs. sweet potatoes
* 1/2 c maple syrup
* 1 tsp. SWEET CURRY (from Penzeys)
* 1/2 tsp. GARAM MASALA (from Penzeys)
* 1/2 tsp. salt
* 1/2 C chopped pecans

Peel the sweet potatoes and boil them until tender. Drain and mash the sweet potatoes when they are cooked. Heat the maple syrup, the curry powder, the garam masala and the salt in a small saucepan. Simmer for 1-2 minutes. Add the syrup mixture to the sweet potatoes and mix well. Sprinkle with the pecans and serve.

Seriously…YUM!

Anyone beginning to think about Thanksgiving preparations yet? It’s about a week and a half so I consider this coming week the calm before the storm. This is the week I will try to do some deep cleaning, sprucing and making a few things ahead to freeze to simplify cooking and baking next week. We will have 19 loved ones in our home next week and I absolutely cannot wait! Of course, I’m going to need to seriously consider something like myrtle beach vacation rentals after this is all over with, but for now the anticipation is increasing.

Is your household gearing up? What will you do this week to lighten your load next week if you are hosting?

We learned an important lesson this week…and it’s a vital one if you own a freezer stocked with expensive food. Allow me to share…

One of my kids left our upright freezer door ajar on Monday afternoon. I did not discover this unfortunate event until approximately 36 hours later on Wednesday. By this time, there was a puddle in front of the freezer, a mess on the bottom of the freezer (thawing meat…blood…ick!). I placed a thermometer into the freezer and found that the temperature was still about 40 degrees. Cold enough that the food was still safe…yet rapidly thawing.

I closed the freezer and said to myself…”WHEW! I’m sure glad I found that near disaster…now we’ll just let it refreeze and all will be fine.” Sound good? I thought so…

Unfortunately…every time I went downstairs to check the freezer, the food was not refreezing as I expected it to. I told myself that the freezer simply needed to catch back up and it might take up to 24 hours. The temp in the freezer by this point was about 30 degrees F.

By the next day, the situation had not changed. Temp still 30 and food still not refreezing. I googled and googled and found nothing about what to expect when a freezer is recovering from being left open. Finally, I called the manufacturer and spoke with a service tech.

What I was told was that we needed to manually switch the freezer into a defrost mode by turning a screw in the back of the freezer. Doing this would turn the freezer off for 30 minutes and during that time any ice that had accumulated would melt and the freezer would then be able to recover from being left open and would be ready to freeze again.

Well…we did that and decided to use that defrosting time to clean it out. We actually ended up switching it back into the manual defrost mode two more times (the freezer was off and melting for 1.5 hours total) and by the time we turned it back on it was completely defrosted and spic and span inside.

We refilled it, turned it back on, crossed our fingers and said a prayer.

Within about two hours the temp was down to about 15 degrees F and it was cranking again. At this writing, everything is rock hard again and we averted disaster.

Lesson? Freezers need help to recover from being left open. You cannot just close the door and expect them to resume freezing without defrosting all of the partially defrosted ice that accumulates when this happens. Nowhere was this information readily available, either online or in the instruction manual. It took calling and speaking with a service tech to learn about this.

File this away in your little mental filing cabinet if this ever happens to you! May save you hundreds of dollars in valuable freezer items!

I began the annual task of covering some of our old leaky windows with shrinking plastic today. As I usually do, I used this opportunity to remove all of the curtains and give them a good dusting (air cycle in the dryer with a damp towel). I also removed the blinds and gave the whole bow window trio a good vacuuming.

Then……as I was contemplating putting the whole thing back together after the window plastic was on……one thing led to another and I ended up ordering three new pleated curtains for the trio of windows. I never intended to…one thing led to another and before I knew it, it was a done deal.

We are expecting a houseful of people in a few weeks for Thanksgiving and I haven’t done any redecorating in quite a while…so I figure I was due. Plus, when hubby asks how much the gorgeous curtains I got were, I can tell him I used shop.com to find a great deal.

I can’t wait until my new window coverings come…honestly. They are going to look awesome with the new bolster pillows I also ordered. Gasp! Yes…I told you one thing led to another!

How are the outdoor safety conditions around your home and property? Do you have adequate lighting that will come on when you need it? Do you have lighting that will shine brightly to deter intruders? I ask because I was just reading something interesting about outdoor light fixtures and how important and instrumental they are in deterring residential crime and keeping people safe on their property. This is something that is easy to overlook…but having it there when you need it is so valuable.

We have one fixture out on the side of our garage that I think needs to be replaced. It has never shown directly and effectively to light up this area well.

Other than this, I feel reasonable confident that we are well-lit outside and deterring prowlers from sneaking around where we don’t want them. This means ‘coons in my compost bin, too!

Well…we are on the mend from H1N1 in my home. Two of our nine family members are still sick at this writing (one hasn’t caught it at all). Although it was certainly no picnic and I would have loved to avoid it…it wasn’t the devastation that you read and hear about. Everyone was quite sick for at least two hard days and several others (me included) we quite sick for about five hard days. More of us were less sick rather than more sick, though.

I’m glad to be through it and not have to live in a constant state of anxiety over getting it, though.

If you have not had it yet…here are a few tips I recently came across:

1. Wash your hands constantly.

2. Keep your hands off of your face. Stop touching your face except when you are eating or washing.

3. Gargle two times a day with warm salt water. This may be enough to kill H1N1 germs if you are infected.

4. Clean the insides of your nose with a warm salt water solution

5. Eat foods high in vitamin C.

6. Drink warm liquids during the day (coffee, tea, etc.). Same effect as gargling with salt water.

Stay well!

During times that I am healthy and on top of my game, I would normally give significant consideration to ceramic tiles for the home. In fact, I would love to replace some aging tiles I have in my upstairs bathroom. They have been through many years of messy people and I would love to update the colors up there. At this point, I will longingly dream about such things and hopefully soon I will have more energy to pursue something fun like this.

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