Thanksgiving, a barely tangentially romance-related musing

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Weird, right? Most kids will say Christmas or maybe Halloween if they're still high on candy. Adults of my acquaintance will cite Easter or Christmas or Fourth of July. But Thanksgiving, with its focus on gratitude and food and hanging with friends and family is mine.

I haven't been home for Thanksgiving since my first year in college. I tried a few times, but between the airport crowds, the short visit and the early blizzards that ground flights all over the Midwest, getting from Virginia to California just got to be too much of a pain. So we tend to collect stray folks for a few weeks before the holiday--both people who can't get home and people who can't deal with home. I think I'm feeding eight or nine this year, which doesn't sound like very many unless you've seen our condo. It's...not large. But it doesn't matter. We're coming together for food and friendship and drunken Cards Against Humanity into the wee hours.

It probably won't surprise anyone that I'm a little tiny bit obsessive about my Thanksgiving menu, ordering my turkey a month in advance, starting my shopping two weeks before and maintaining a year-round Pinterest board of new takes on Thanksgiving favorites. So in preparation for my review of Apples Should Be Red, Penny Watson's lovely Thanksgiving-set romance novella between a older man and woman, I'll just say that my approach is very much more like the heroine at the beginning of the story than the end of the story. Someday I might grow out of it, but...I doubt it.

Oh, and here's the Thanksgiving Pinterest board with everything I'm actually cooking this year.

I also thought I'd take this opportunity to say thank you today to all the wonderful people I've met through my renewed love of romance over the six months since I started blogging. Thank you for reading, thank you for writing, thank you for your encouragement and thank you for talking me off the occasional (figurative) ledge. You are all wonderful, amazing, talented people and I hope I get to meet many of you in person in the upcoming year.