When November rolls around, my mind always turns to thoughts of...food. I am a huge fan of Thanksgiving food - turkey, potatoes, gravy, pies, apple cider, cranberry sauce and, most of all, stuffing. (Or dressing, if you insist.) I mean, I love being thankful and all that but...stuffing. I swoon. There may have, in fact, been a few years in college where I subsisted almost entirely on brightly packaged Stove Top and bags of Pepperidge Farm. And here is where I admit that I have never made stuffing from scratch despite my DIY tendencies. I grew up on Pepperidge Farm and have such a warm place in my heart for it that I can't imagine how it could be any better. (Or, ahem, easier.) I'm always open to suggestions, so if you've got a relatively simple delicious homemade stuffing recipe, lay it on me!
Another favorite part of Thanksgiving food - canned cranberry sauce. No...the jellied kind. I know. I know.
During the time I lived in Oregon, I spent Thanksgiving every year with some very dear friends. One of them had a tradition that she called "thankful corn." It went like this - we would take a little ear of that decorative dried Indian corn and go around the table each plucking a kernel of corn and stating what we were thankful for. I have a love/hate relationship with this tradition. I think it is wonderful and sweet and a good reminder of why we should be thankful. But I'm not a sharer. It kind of makes me feel all nervous and squidgy inside. All the same, I love it. And I miss those dear friends, whom I haven't seen since I moved away.
But back to the (edible) food! One of my very favorite Thanksgiving traditions is baking an apple pie. If I do say so myself, I make a darn good apple pie. One former roommate once remarked that it was "so good!" and "better than my mom's!" but not to tell her mom! One memorable Thanksgiving involved me speeding along the interstate to a new boyfriend's family's house in an unfamiliar city with a perfect apple pie perched precariously on the passenger seat. The pie and I both made it safely, though in hindsight the pie was probably more well received that I was...
One of my new November loves - and I suspect it will remain for some time - is remembering how lovely it is to be able to pull out all the handknits I've been knitting on all year and how good it feels to actually get some use out of them! Texas was notoriously uncooperative on that account but Maine is proving much more obliging. I've already been wearing my lovely wool socks and would be wearing more items if I could just locate them in the mass of confusion that surrounds most of our personal possessions at the moment... (A side note - the pair-of-socks-a-month thing hit a brick wall with the onset of morning sickness, extreme fatigue and a cross-country move. With any luck, September's socks will be done by the end of November!)
What about you? What do you love about November?
