Mom wakes up super early and goes shopping with her stepmother and if her sister Varsi is up (95% of the time she is, I think she didn't come up once due to weather or something) she brings her kids along too. I knew that mom was still goig shopping this year too. Dad gets up with her and puts the turkey in the oven and then goes over to his sister's for some coffee. I'll get up fairly early and start cooking some pies. Casey... sleeps in til noon.

I'll be in the kitchen cooking three pies: Pumpkin, Chocolate, and cheese cake because my family can't pick just one. Normally I end up baking two of each which sometimes (rarely) get taken to other family members, but normally they've devoured by the family in a matter of days. I'll have the TV on the the Thanksgiving parade, dad will come home, check on HIS turkey (In the end it always becomes HIS), then will migrate to the living room to watch the prade on a different channel and do the newspaper's crossword puzzel. Occationally yelling for me to change to a different station if he sees something cool.

When the pies are cooking I'll go have a shower and get dress. Casey is either up flicking through channels by now or at least waking up. I go out and start cleaning the kitchen. Wash all the dishes, remove junk from the table, scrub the table down, ect. Casey will have by this point found what channel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on. It is ALWAYS playing on Thanksgiving for some reason. She'll come out proclaiming Charlie Chunket and the Water Factory is on as she got so excited once as a little kid, that's what she had called it. So she'll sit in the kitchen with me as I keep cleaning.

Mom will call at some point to know when the turkey will be done and when she should come home. Casey will whine about not being allowed to eat breakfast. I'll take my pies out. Then finally everything speeds up as mom comes home with bags of stuff  she got on sale. Dad takes out the Turkey as he and I rush to make the mash patatos, stuffing, gravy, rolls, corn, and peas to go with the meal. We don't cook them until after the Turkey is nearly ready so they're nice and warm, besides my family tends to have a cheap taste and we love the instant stuff.

So we tend to eat around 3pm. That way all we need to do is have leftovers for dinner or you know... just eat pie. Casey will drown her food in gravey as she always does and someone will make a joke about it. Mom would tell stories of the crazy people in the stores, and dad would look all proud and ask us about how much we love his turkey, and because he's so proud it doesn't matter if the turkey is just a little dry, we tell him it's perfect, so he can beam and say how he always makes the best turkey...

And that's where I lost it. I started bawling as I pictued my dad, sitting there, all happy and talking about how he had another year of great sucess with the bird. I tried to take myself out of the picture and of course that only made me more upset. I thought back to other thanksgivings, they're all about the same, but people look a little different. A little younger. I got upset because I was really starting to depress myself wondering what it would be like come thanksgiving and someone has passed - or someone can't get off work - or someone is in the hospital instead?

Then I thought it would be fun and take that one step FURTHER and started upsetting myself because I don't want to go home. I don't want to leave, but I want to be home. This all lasted the span of maybe fifteen minutes, before I pulled myself together. Calmed down. Was thankful for this experience, settled down, reminded myself I would be home for chirstmas - then quickly reminded myself I still had time to be happy here too, and went back to the normal schedualed program of daydreaming about random anime characters and giant turtles fighting.