My First Thanksgiving Married

There are several things that make my first Thanksgiving dinner memorable. The best part is that Dan and I were living in New Market, England and had just celebrated being married 6 months. Now, anyone who knows me understands when I say cooking is not one of my strengths. But cooking for Thanksgiving... now that's my specialty. I love making the dinner and all that goes with it. It starts days before with all the shopping for just the right stuff. Think about it, two newlyweds from big families, and their first Thanksgiving dinner. The one thing we both agreed, we made way too much food! I guess we both cooked like we were still living back with our respective families. Learning to scale down the prep is something I still work on.

We were in a foreign country with a lot of lonely GI's, so we invited over some of the guys from Dan's job. They all moved with us to England when we left Spain. We were like a big family. The only newcomer was a guy named Kevin, who we met at the job in England. The day before the meal I was baking the bread and rolls. I made 6 pumpkin pies, 2 for dinner and one for each of the 4 guys we had joining us. There were 6 loaves of bread and 4 dozen rolls... like I said, we over cooked. I had an 8 piece corning ware casserole set plus two other casserole dishes. There was something in each of them. I'd asked the guys ahead of time what they liked most about their family meals and we agreed I'd try to make it for them. Hence, the rolls and pumpkin pies. I made 4 of the giant cans of sweet potatoes...and we ran out! Laugh if you want, but we made about 8 pounds of mashed potatoes, corn, green bean casserole, broccoli, cranberry sauce and cranberries, three types of stuffing, and 26 pound turkey. Yep, 26 pounds! We wanted to have tons of leftovers to give the guys to take with them. Do you have any idea how much lonely GIs miss homemade cooking? Before dinner we had the usual relish trays, cheese and crackers, summer sausage cubes, beenie weenies in BBQ sauce, chips, dips...you name it. I loved it. When you're not particularly good at cooking and you see what you've made literally disappear before your eyes, it's something you'll never forget. I actually cried in the kitchen listening to them while they were having such a good time.

Now, normally, in the States you watch football all day. They don't even play football in England, they play soccer. So the guys watched soccer and rugby. Dan kept coming in the kitchen to make sure I was doing OK. He wanted to help, but this is the one day I want to do it all. As can be expected, GIs "imbibe" in the beverages, he-he-he. Kevin drank so much wine that when Dan set the turkey on the dinner table for him tohave his first official "Head of the House" turkey carving rite, Kevin got impatient. Kevin stood up, put one hand on the side of the turkey and proceeded to pull the entire drumstick right off the bird! Dan's face went pale because he thought I'd get upset. Upset??? I laughed so hard I almost peed! We all burst out laughing! From then on I just sat and watched food getting shoveled into the mouths of the guys. It was great. They loved it. Watching Dan's face made every bit of the work worth it. He was the head of the house, with his buddies, eating good food, and not being homesick for a few hours.

Later that night, when everything was cleaned up, the guys had sobered up, and we drove them back to the barracks with their leftovers and their own pies. Life was good. We didn't talk much on the way home. We were both thinking of our Stateside families so we headed over to the Bob Hope Rec Center to call the families in the US. Those conversations always went by too fast. We couldn't afford to talk long, but we sure missed our families. Thank God we had each other.

That night we talked about how great the day was. We prayed for years of good Thanksgivings ahead. God answered our prayers for 28 more years... Tomorrow we may not be holding each other as we fall asleep like we did all the other years, but when I close my eyes, he'll still be holding me like he always did.