Pleasant Chaos

Happy Thanksgiving! I hate being away from family on holidays, so I set out to make sure we had a grand adventure on our own. Figuring there were other poor college students out there without places to go for Thanksgiving dinner, we organized dinner at our house and invited several families and the missionaries.

In the end, we had 12 adults and 6 children. It was delightful.

One of my most favorite parts about the day was the fact that we had an absolutely AMAZING meal, and all I cooked was the Jell-O. Score.

Chris doesn't like turkey, so we did contribute a ham. I still maintain my un-cooking, though because Chris did the ham. I helped here and there. We started the night before with a brine.

We put it in the cooler because that was the only thing big enough to submerge the ham in, and we put it outside overnight because it was freezing. Low 20s.

In the morning, Chris added the rub and baked it in the oven, adding the glaze along the way. By the way, Chris has a beard.

It came out completely delicious. Talk about flavor.
 

And moving on to the actual dinner... Chris Carron made the turkey.

Post dinner activities included bug house.

And the Phillips-traditional puzzle. This puzzle turned out a lot harder than I expected, just because you really needed the picture to figure out where pieces went and there was only one copy to go around. Less useful.

The kids particularly enjoyed bonding with the elders. I hope they didn't mind...

Audrey played chess with Charlie Mower. Throwing that specific detail in for the sake of the Aberdeeners out there.

Pie!

When I say I only cooked Jell-O, I did also make these two pies and homemade Reeses.

I guess I haven't counted that ask cooking because for all of those, I just mixed stuff together and put it in the fridge. But man, it was something delicious.

All told, it was a wonderful day. I'm grateful that we had so many friends willing to come to our house, and we had a really good time. Yay!

Ending note: One point at which it became terribly obvious that this wasn't a Phillips or a Wampler party, however, was the amount of olives left over after every had gone home. Maybe not so much the amount, but more the fact that there were any left over. I'm pretty sure this has NEVER happened in all my memories of Thanksgiving.

P.S. Happy Birthday Michael!