Thanksgiving often gets shuffled between Halloween and Christmas, and sometimes gets a little forgotten and rushed through. For the majority of my life, I’ve known Thanksgiving to be a routine of traveling to our families, spending the day cooking, anticipating a huge meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles, and oh, so many desserts. I did have fond memories of Thanksgiving and the time I had with my family and my other half’s family, but it was always such a rush and a blur.

At the end of the day (while again, I LOVE my family), we came home exhausted and glutonous, rushing through the next 3 weeks to get together again for Christmas and New Years. And by the begining of the year, we all felt like this…

A few years ago, Justin and I sat down, competely exhausted from the activities and the holidays, and thought,

“How can we fix this?”

Thinking through the year, we realized, as precious as the holidays and our families are to us, we never set aside time for just the three of us to enjoy ourselves. Think about this…

There are 52 weeks in a year. Let’s say we celebrate 3 major holidays with others (4th of July, Easter, Christmas), our birthdays (1 weekend), birthday celebrations for family (at least 10 per year), not including birthday celebrations for our friends, and the birthday celebrations that Everly is invited to! That leaves us with with very little time in between, given Monday through Friday is set aside for work, school, and extra curricular activities. It’s easy to feel like we have all this time as a family during the ‘regular seasons,’ but we don’t. Most weeks we don’t have any real conversations.

This is why we decided a few years ago that we would make Thanksgiving ours. What does this mean?

We started a tradition where we go away EVERY THANKSGIVING to dedicate time for us in the midst of Holiday craziness. Sometimes it’s local, sometimes its far, but whatever it is, we agreed to keep it just us. We spend quality time together. We watch a movie, we cook together, we really get to reconnect. It becomes our exhale during the holiday season.

Thanksgiving was not really our favorite holiday. I really didn’t like how I felt after Thanksgiving dinner, and over the years, have really started not to like turkey. Since we started our little traditon, it’s been some of my favorite time of the year.

So today, we are enjoying our Thanksgiving celebration with our core unit, sans prep or cooking, in our pajamas till noon, eating cinnamon rolls from a can, and having some good ol’ family time.

Happy Thanksgiving to all our Family and Friends! We think about our relationships today, and all the love we want to send your way as we reconnect with ours.

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