This is a big week in the U.S.A. with our annual Thanksgiving Day on Thursday. My mosaics this week are all about Thanksgiving.

A few weeks ago I went to a sign making class and it was fun to make the sign above and then find a spot in our home for it.

This mirror has moved around our home but it’s always the spot for our THANKFUL blocks.

Gobble gets it’s spot on the hutch closest to the table where we will gobble our Thanksgiving Meal.

Some different settings over the years.

The food that our plates are never big enough for. Always turkey, always stuffing, always candied sweet potatoes/yams, and always gravy. We can take or leave mashed potatoes or something green. Desserts include pumpkin pie and or pecan pie.

The most important thing is to have people we love sitting around the table. Most years besides our immediate family we have my sister and her hubby with us. She’s the only one of my 7 brothers and sisters that live in the state of Washington. We’ve also had my brother Tim and his wife Letty fly up to spend Thanksgiving with us.

Most years we have two gatherings one at home on any day before or after the big day and one at our friends home with all of their family and friends on the actual day. We work around our kids for this big day. Every other year Josh and Laura trade off being with us and being with Laura’s family. Next year Dan and Jamie will stay home with their new little one. It’s hard to trek 5-1/2 hours over the mountain pass to get here. Andrew missed a few Thanksgivings because he was in Afghanistan or at his base in North Carolina. Katie spent a few Thanksgivings without him by her side.

When your kids get married and have more than one family to enjoy you have to let them have the freedom without nagging and guilt to enjoy holidays elsewhere. We are happy to celebrate anytime we can with our kids. It doesn’t have to be on the given day.

Growing up in my family celebrating Thanksgiving was not a given. My parents immigrated to the U.S. after WWII and it took a while for this holiday to set in. Then the church we were part of had annual conventions over Thanksgiving weekends so the meal was big and in a church hall. Dear and I spent most Thanksgivings after we were married at his mom and dad’s. After we moved our family from California to Washington state we started hosting Thanksgiving. This next photo was our one and only Thanksgiving in Washington State with Dear’s family with us. Dear’s father died in 1985 a couple months before our Katie was born. We moved Dear’s mother up to Washington with us in 1988 and built a mother-in-law apartment for her in our daylight basement.

I’m guessing this was 1989 or so. Dear’s brother and SIL at the head of the table, to the right their two oldest girls (they have one more daughter born in 1991), our three, BIL Steve with glasses that rival mine, sister Lana, me, brother Leonard (Lana’s twin) and Dear’s mother Verna. We left this house behind in 1997.

If you live in the U.S.A. where are you celebrating Thanksgiving this year? Do you cook or are you invited elsewhere?

I’m going to link up with Maggie from Normandy Life for Mosaic Monday and later this week to ABC Wednesday for T is for Thanksgiving with additional thanks to Mrs. Nesbitt and Roger’s team of ABC’ers.

ABC Wednesday is close to starting their Farewell Tour in Blogdom and we were challenged to come up with our first ABC Wednesday Post.

You can see my first post in February of 2008 by clicking on, D is for…