For the first… 16 or so years of my life, I celebrated Thanksgiving with my immediate and extended family. It was always at either my grandparent’s house or my aunt and uncle’s house (maternal uncle – older brother of my mother). It was what I still consider the “typical” middle-class, waspy Thanksgiving day. The holiday revolved mostly around food… women in the kitchen with multiple hours worth of planning, prep, and cooking. Men mostly hanging out in the living room, watching sports and waiting for food. Couple dozen people ranging in ages from toddlers to great-grandparents.
My family always had the same food (which we then also had at Christmas): turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, and more pies than people. I mean seriously… nobody agreed on the same “best pie,” so we all got our favorites and then some. Pecan, chocolate silk, apple, coconut cream, cherry, peach, banana cream, lemon, key lime… and always pumpkin. Nobody ever claimed pumpkin as their favorite pie, but it just wasn’t Thanksgiving without it. If you’re wondering, my favorite pie has pretty much always been apple. I like a good apple crumb (or french apple/dutch apple), but a straight-forward solid apple pie is A+ in my book.
And then, slowly, one by one, the cousins peeled off… celebrating with their new immediate family (getting married, having babies, celebrating with new in-laws, etc). And eventually, we all admitted defeat. No more big family Thanksgivings. My immediate family prioritized Christmas, and let Thanksgiving go.
By the time I was in my mid-to-late 20s, Thanksgiving meant Friendsgiving… potlucks with whoever was in town and blood-family free at that time of year. I still love a good Friendsgiving, but Aneel and I have a new tradition now. Starting a handful of years ago, we camp over Thanksgiving. I prep some food just for the two of us, and we head off towards quiet and have our own little family [non]-celebration.
2023 was no exception to this tradition. We lucked out on Inks Lake State Park reservations, and spent a a long weekend there from Wednesday, Nov 22nd to Saturday November 25th (spoiler: we actually had to the 26th, but we bailed early because of weather).
I prepped pumpkin risotto (recipe made veggie) and a fall salad for our Thanksgiving meal. And I picked up a smorgasbord of goodies from Sugar Mama‘s including little mini pumpkin pies (again.. not my favorite, but a Thanksgiving classic).
We had a fine time camping… good hikes, wildlife.
I attempted an apple cobbler over the campfire. It was tasty… but ugly (and a far cry from a cobbler). I didn’t take a picture of the final product – but it was a fun attempt nonetheless. We had more success with drinking mead (which we also shared with the local bumblers).
Our two biggest victories of the extended weekend were:
- Scoping out the campgrounds for our upcoming eclipse camping trip. This was a big trip in the making… we talked about camping for the 2024 total eclipse starting years before and ended up with a two week reservation and a spectacular trip (posts coming soon). What we wanted to know was… would the cell service be strong enough to work from the campground for an extended period of time? After touring around, checking things out… we determined yep! Things had improved quite a bit from our original Inks Lake camping, where we had to trek up to the entrance and sit in very particular spots to check our email and get our Duolingo check-ins.
- Visiting the fish hatchery just down the road from the campgrounds. The fish hatchery itself was I guess technically closed. No tours, no people. But we parked, hiked, and looked around. It was pretty cool. Nice birding in that area, a short-ish but pleasant hike, and some fish information.
Sadly, the weather didn’t hold and right at the end of our hatchery visit, it started to rain. We headed back to our campground, but then after sitting inside our trailer for an hour, we realized it was going to rain for the rest of the day and we could hang out inside the trailer or pack it up and go home. We folded like cheap poker tables and packed up early. Heading home didn’t really feel like failure because of our sweet cats waiting for us and the cuddles we enjoyed.
