Happy Thanksgiving To My Fellow Bloggers

 

A.I. generated picture I got from typing in "celebrating Thanksgiving with fellow bloggers in the style of Dali." I thought it appropriate to head this post.

With my extended family deceased and my immediate family scattered across this country, our Thanksgivings recently have been pretty low key. This year will be no exception. As years go by, we tend to focus more on giving back to our community and others over celebrating the holiday for ourselves.

I belong to a fraternal organization that does periodic fund raisers throughout the year. One of the things we raise money for is to create Thanksgiving boxes for those in need. We usually get a ham and all the traditional fixings for a dinner, put it in a box and then give them to another organization that deals specifically with a certain clientele within our community. Many of their clients have mental issues. Others are destitute and just can't get to other places that serve the needy on that particular day. This year, even with inflation costing us nearly 30% in higher food costs, we were still able to box up 50 dinners for 50 families, all within our county. This happened earlier this week.

Today, perhaps as you read this, we will be volunteering our time to deliver hot Thanksgiving meals to those in need around our county. I think they do somewhere on the order of several thousand dinners every year. We usually do a route or two, comprising of about 4 to 5 stops per route before returning home. It is always an eye opening experience delivering these meals to houses with no heat and barely any furniture. We take along our girls so that they get to see that not everyone has it as lucky as we do. When we are done, we will be chilled and our gas gauge will be a bit lower but our hearts will be warm.

When we get home from that, we will put the final touches on a pretty basic meal. We are having the turkey I smoked last week, some form of potato, vegetable, some rolls my wife made this past weekend and a couple pies I made yesterday, perhaps a few other dishes. It will be my wife and kids, a priest with no nearby family and a couple foreign school teachers, also with no family, in total seven of us.

I am thankful for all that I have and all that I could give back to my community this year. I hope all those out there in blogger land are having a wonderful holiday as well, even my Canadian friends who celebrate a month too early and those in foreign countries that don't even celebrate a holiday this time of year. I'll raise my glass as shown above and solute all of you for continuing to enrich my life with your writings.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Our Thanksgiving pies made the day before from homegrown Hubbard squash and homegrown apples.