Thanksgiving for Less

This year, instead of shoveling things into our bodies and home for Thanksgiving, DH and I decided to do a Thanksgiving clean-out instead. As a teacher, he got this week off, and we are focusing every day on cleaning out, organizing and simplifying our lives. Taking out instead of taking in.

We graciously declined invitations to join other families’ dinner tables this year, thankful for them but knowing what we need. After a crazy month, we are actually quite excited to just breathe, and be, and have a truly simple, stress-free Thanksgiving.

We cook all the time (in fact, we basically never eat out at this point, with the food allergy dangers), so we decided that instead of cooking a huge meal Thursday, we’d go the other way. Our local natural market has a $25 made-to-order vegan holiday meal we ordered (complete with red lentil loaf, vegan mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, veggies and cranberry sauce — and their prepared foods are quite pure and delicious). All we do Thursday morning is pick it up for our holiday lunch (and many leftovers). (We, who cook every night, are not cooking on the cooking day of the year; it is kind of humorous. Of course, yes, I guess we are taking in!)

In our clean-out, we’re donating everything we don’t use to charity, DH’s school garage sale, and the local library.  We’re slowly washing out everything in our still smoke-smelling house (from the wildfires). We’re giving our DD much-needed quiet time, as her system still seems to be battling allergies, stuffy nose and respiratory distress. We’ll take a walk on the beach Thanksgiving morning. We’ll take our vitamins.

We’ll also drive an hour and a half to see some of DH’s family on Friday, after the food fest is over and the L.A. freeways less crowded. We did that last year, too (although I still cooked a vegan holiday meal and various desserts), and it worked well.

This year, though, if things keep going as well as they have this weekend (when my mom was in town to babysit, so DH and I purged our home office) — we should be able to hit the road Friday with a thoroughly cleaned-out home, and with better-rested, not-overstuffed bodies.

We’ll still enjoy family time, celebrate, and feel happy and thankful. Just especially thankful for having less this year.