successful turkey day

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Thursday was a little depressing here because the day itself was just like any other- and especially with J having a game it was really weird to not be doing anything to celebrate. It is the first time in my life that I haven't had turkey on Thanksgiving Day... he has had practice in the past on the actual day, but we have always been lucky enough to have a "real" Thanksgiving meal on Thanksgiving.


Since we didn't get a chance to celebrate on Thursday, we had our turkey day today. I can happily report that it was a huge success!! I was a little worried as to how everything would turn out, even though I've cooked several Thanksgiving meals in the past (usually 20-25 lb. turkeys!) so it was nothing new to me... but with the difficulty of finding things that we are familiar with over here and not having all of my own kitchen utensils and cooking materials I was a little nervous. The boys loved it, and it was delicious! It was so great to get together "just us Americans" to celebrate and have time together. Ther are only 2 others on the team, so you really have to stick together. Made us all feel a little more at home I think :)


Last night was the team Christmas party. It was a very nice and classy event, and we enjoyed it very much. It was kind of funny celebrating Christmas before Thanksgiving though. Christmas is the big holiday here, and from now thorough Christmas day they have lots of Christmas parties around here. We're all ready for the season- we bought a fake tree along with some ornaments from Ikea (for 2.50 euros, gotta love Ikea!) and we just decorated it tonight. We also have a real tree, but it's a "Charlie Brown" tree... my other fellow American girl and her boyfriend were up at his cabin a couple weeks ago and they dug some cute little evergreen trees out and brought one to us. It's still deciding if it wants to "live" in the pot or not... hopefully it will last us through the holidays though! I can't believe it's almost December... my favorite month of the year!! Time to start Christmas shopping!!


Since we are in full holiday spirit here... I've been thinking a lot about how thankful I am for everything this past year, and it only makes me even more optimistic for the future. I hope you have all been as blessed as we have. Happy start to the Holiday Season!!


With that being said, here is a flashback song to listen to and get you pumped up for the holidays... (and to get a good laugh watching the video!) :)