How Do You Celebrate the Holidays Following the Death of a Family Member?

a post by Giselle Renarde

Thanksgiving has never been a big holiday in my family. It isn’t as big here in Canada as it is in the states. I’d venture to say it also means something different. It’s mostly just an excuse to eat turkey. At least, that’s always been the case in my family.

My mother is a terrible cook, but she always cooks for us (myself and my siblings). Over-cooked, under-seasoned food is part of our tradition.

If we’re very lucky, my mom’s sister invites us to join herself and her husband for Thanksgiving. They’re amazing hosts and excellent chefs, the both of them.

We got lucky this year. We received a very unusual invitation, as far as Thanksgiving dinners go.

My family is in mourning at the moment. You know this, if you’ve been reading my posts of the last few months. In case you’re not aware, one of my cousins died unexpectedly of an overdose. What I’m learning, from this death more than any other, is that grief can weigh heavily on a family for a long time… potentially forever.

My late cousin’s immediate family—my aunt, uncle and cousin—are not okay.

Thanksgiving was the first time I saw them since the funeral. My mom’s sister planned a gathering with them in mind—with grief in mind. In a way, grief was the guest of honour. It sat among us, silently drawing our attention in its direction as we conversed.

The host of this gathering, my mother’s sister, was incredibly thoughtful in her approach. Knowing that the holidays are a hard time for those in mourning, the evening she planned was the total opposite of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

There was no turkey, no stuffing, no sit-down meal. In fact, we didn’t even eat indoors. We ate in the garage. It was lit by fairy lights and candles (fake ones, so we wouldn’t burn the house down). No meticulously laid-out table. No gleaming cutlery. No cutlery at all. We ate with our hands. It was all that sort of food.

My mother’s sister, who planned the gathering, told me she’s been learning that different people prefer different atmospheres. Some people like the darkness, especially during a mourning period. They don’t have to worry what they look like. And my aunt, uncle and cousin—they’re not looking so great these days.

When I got my aunt alone, I asked her how she’s doing. Some days are better than others, she said. Some days are terrible. Some are okay. She’s more concerned about her daughter and her husband. My uncle blames himself for his son’s death. She looks at her family, at her daughter and her husband, and she sees that they’re thinking… they’re thinking…

And I know exactly what she means, because I noticed the same thing. When we were all sitting around the living room chatting—with the lights on—I often looked at my uncle and my cousin, and I noticed them staring into space. No, not staring into space—staring into a space. Into that space occupied by grief.

As I said, grief sat among us. It was just more visible to those who felt they should shoulder the blame for my cousin’s death. The looks on their faces… well, it reminded me of a friend of mine, of when she used to have frequent PTSD blackouts. You’d look at her and she just wasn’t there. Her face seemed vacant.

One more reason the darkness at dinner was so welcome to so many of us. In the dark, there’s no one policing the look on your face, no one noting what you’re eating or not eating. Perhaps nobody would be judging you anyway, but in the dark there’s no false perception of being judged.

So, how do you celebrate the holidays after the death of a family member? Like this. In the dark. Maybe some people would prefer to cling to traditions, but for others, traditions bring on a wash of associations that are too much to handle when a family member’s death is still so fresh.

This will be a year of firsts, for my family. Thanksgiving was the first first. Next will be Christmas. I don’t know if we’ll dine in the dark for that, but I wouldn’t mind if we did. I wouldn’t mind one bit.

Supporting someone who is grieving deeply is so difficult, and most of us feel lost. We have no idea what to do and we’re scared of saying the wrong thing. I want to help my family, and in many ways (and for many reasons) I feel like I don’t know how. That’s why I’ve decided to donate all my October royalties from sales of my Erotic Older Women books to a non-profit in my city that does peer grief counselling. I might not know how to help, but they do, so please help me help the bereaved by purchasing:
Older Women, Wild Desires
Older Women, Lesbian Desires
Older Women, Kinky Desires
Or all three in one collection: Erotic Older Women

What Good Old Days?

by Jean Roberta

This post is partly about synchronicity: events or items that appear close together, apparently at random, but which form patterns.

Yesterday, a venerable local restaurant, The Diplomat, put on an American Thanksgiving Day feast of butternut squash soup, roast turkey, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and pumpkin pie. This was a new thing for the restaurant, which has been a downtown landmark for many years in the prairie town of Regina, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and capital of the province of Saskatchewan.

Of course, Canadians don’t get a day off for American Thanksgiving. We had ours on a Monday in October.

My spouse Mirtha and I made reservations and went to the Diplomat, a dimly-lit space decorated with oil portraits of diplomats on the walls. Since my American parents passed away in 2009, Mirtha and I have both missed my mother’s American Thanksgiving family suppers, which sometimes alternated with American thanksgiving in the home of some other expatriate faculty members at the local university. My family moved north in the 1960s, as part of a mini-exodus of intellectuals during the Vietnam War era. In the fifty years since then, nearly all the academics of my parents’ generation that I knew in my youth have passed away. (One notable exception, my father’s old colleague in the Economics Department, celebrated a book launch and his 100th birthday on the same day as the feast at the Diplomat.)

So Mirtha (who is Chilean-born) and I went to the restaurant for a “family” style turkey supper. I felt nostalgic for the Thanksgivings of my childhood in Idaho. Mirtha felt nostalgic for my mother’s Thanksgiving suppers, which she attended as a guest for twenty years.

We both know that the first Thanksgiving in the U.S. was a celebration (giving thanks to a Protestant God) for a victory of white settlers over the “Indians.” It had been a slaughter.

It troubles my conscience that this has become such a characteristic American holiday. I prefer to think of Thanksgiving the way Mirtha seems to, as a simple occasion for good food and (if possible) good company.

We would have liked the companionship of some close friends or relatives, but neither of us missed my father’s rants about how much better everything was in the U.S. in the good old days before troublemakers began demanding social and legal equality for all human adults. At family get-togethers, he usually held forth on a subject dear to the heart of every American conservative: the supposed compatibility of “democracy” with extreme disparities of income, of experience, and of status. According to this logic, “democracy” requires recognition of the inherent inequality of different groups of people, and the necessity of allowing the fittest to survive at the expense of the rest.

I’ve never actually heard a conservative claim that slavery was a democratic institution, but I’ve heard it implied. And I’ve been told that the drastic racial segregation formerly enforced by “Jim Crow” laws was necessary at the time, and would help keep the peace now.

This week, I got the latest issue of BBC History magazine, to which I subscribe. It includes two short articles under the title “Why are America’s white supremacists on the march again?” A woman historian, Manisha Sinha, briefly summed up the history of American racism since the U.S. Civil War, which resulted in the end of slavery. By upper-class southern standards, the uncompensated loss of slaves was an enormous loss of property, from which that class never completely recovered. Ms. Sinha discusses that loss as a kind of founding event, and she mentions the Confederate flag as a symbol of resistance to an interracial democracy.

Dr. Michael Cullinane begins his article this way: “White supremacy tarnishes every era of United States history. Even at the outset of the government’s founding [in 1776], white privilege prevailed.” I found it refreshing to read about a familiar topic from a non-American perspective.

While reading, I couldn’t help imagining the voice of my late grandmother (dad’s mother), who had southern roots. “But those people belong with their own kind,” she would say. “It’s only natural.” She also liked to reminisce about the “good old days,” when “everybody had servants.”

Last week, when teaching a story in the “Southern Gothic” tradition to my first-year English classes, I thought about how upper-class southern nostalgia for the “gracious living” of the antebellum past has spread throughout American mainstream culture. It literally makes me nauseous.

Even while gruesome little cell-phone videos show white men in uniform killing unarmed black civilians in front of their loved ones, and this evidence is shown regularly on the news (even here in Canada), the mainstream mantra seems to be “there’s fault on both sides.” I’m sure this would be my father’s argument.

Any moral code that isn’t based on a general recognition of human rights seems to me to be no better than anarchy. Yet morally-righteous defenders of extreme oppression seem to abound everywhere, including in Canada. The only difference between nations is in which underdog is being abused.

And I haven’t even brought up violence against women. In the region where I live, this especially affects indigenous women.

Mirtha sometimes tells me she wants to get off this planet. Sometimes I want to go with her. But since we’re not really willing to die yet, we distract ourselves with the comforts of our own little life together.

Even though I sign petitions and even send letters of protest to various levels of government about the latest outrage, I know there is really nothing we can do about racism, or sexism, or classism. All these abominations seem to be getting worse rather than fading away, as the optimists of the past said they would.

In the meanwhile, there’s always good food and drink for those of us who can afford them.

How It Began

by Kristina Wright

A year ago in the very early morning hours of Thanksgiving here in the US, I sat in a dark room pounding out a few thousand words of a proposal for my first single title anthology. I had promised the proposal before the end of the week, despite the very busy holiday weekend, despite the fact that I had a not-quite-three-month-old baby sleeping upstairs (sleeping more than I was that week, to be sure) and a not-quite-two-year-old sleeping across the hall. So, before I had even put the turkey in the oven, before dawn had streaked the morning sky and running on an average of four hours of sleep a night for three months, I finished the proposal.

The proposal was approved, the book was contracted and I proceeded to write an eighty thousand word book in less than three months. The book hit the virtual shelves on October 25-- almost eleven months to the date of that dark Thanksgiving morning when I finished and sent the proposal. And because I wrote the book in such a compressed span of time-- and because there are roughly twenty short stories-- I have forgotten much of what I've written.

It's a strange thing, rereading my own writing and knowing I wrote the words because the story feels familiar, but not really remembering writing them. It has happened a lot in the past few years, as my production has risen while my sleep has decreased. Being pregnant, having babies, caring for children, being continually sleep deprived, having an endless stream of deadlines to meet-- it all makes for a sometimes faulty memory. And so I often lay in bed at night staring into the darkness and wondering how I'm doing it all, why I'm doing it all, whether I can do it all. Sometimes those questions-- and the lack of answers-- keeps me awake at night. It's a vicious cycle.

But this book I wrote in a frenzy at the beginning of the year, that is now available in all the usual online stores, is a point of pride for me. It is my first entire book in over a decade. I am proud of my anthologies-- six published to date, a seventh on the way in a month, four more contracted and in various stages-- but to have an entire book that is me, all me, has been a goal for several years. There is the inner critic that grumbles that it's "just" a collection of short stories and not a real novel, as I still dream-- scratch that-- plan to write, but even I can see how ridiculous my inner critic is being. I wrote a proposal, sold a book, wrote a book and saw it published in the span of a year. A very, very busy year, with a new baby in the house, a toddler going through all sorts of adjustments (along with my body, my marriage and my mind) and several other contracts and commitments to meet. I wrote a book in what everyone told me would be the hardest year of my life-- the year I had two babies under two. I wrote a book.

That thought, that single thought, is why I keep writing. Why I will always write, no matter what path my life takes. Writing sustains me. It keeps me awake in the dark, yes, but since I was a very young child, I have soothed myself to sleep by telling myself stories. The darkness is where dreams become words for me.

My book, Seduce Me Tonight (HarperCollins Mischief, October 2012), contains a collection of loosely linked short stories about couples in various stages of their lives and relationships. From people just meeting and falling in love (or lust), to long-married couples rekindling the passion between them, it's a book about people connecting in different ways, about the need to be held, comforted, loved, desired, wanted and understood. Many of the stories overlap, with recurring characters and settings. It was a fun book to write-- yes, even as I was killing myself to make deadline-- and I'm hoping it finds a wide readership who also believe in the power of love and lust.

Many of the stories include night scenes and darkness-- perhaps because that's where secrets are to be discovered. Here is a snippet from my story "Coming Home":

I knew I shouldn’t be there. I mean, hell, it wasn’t like I had even been invited. I’d broke in for god’s sake. I’d broken the law—and for what? To sit in the dark and wait for Quentin to come home so he could throw my ass out. Not for the first time, I wondered if he even would come home. It was 3 AM and I’d been sitting at his kitchen table for two hours already, running my fingers over the scarred kitchen table and planning what I was going to say to him. Two hours in—make that two months—and I still wasn’t sure what words were going to come out of my mouth when I saw him. For the hundredth time, I reflexively pressed the keypad on my phone and watched it light up with the time. 3:17.

Quentin and I were a lot alike. Both of us slung drinks for a living—alcohol for him and coffee for me—and we were both quiet and introspective, which made us good listeners for other people’s issues but not too good at sharing our own problems with each other. Quentin was stoic in dealing with life’s curveballs, whether it was his father’s unexpected death or a tree falling on his truck, and he could get focused on work or helping his brother rebuild that old Mustang of their dad’s, or repairing the fence on that piece of property out in the country, until the crisis passed.

Me, I was more inclined to run away from anything I couldn’t face head on—and sometimes that meant skipping town for a few days. Or a few weeks, in this case. I’d told my boss I had a personal crisis and needed to take as much of my vacation time as he could give me. He said my job would be waiting when I got back. All I could do was hope he was telling the truth. I was going to need a steady paycheck. Especially if Quentin bailed on me.

I knew he was still bartending at Kayla’s—but this wasn’t the city where bars stayed open until dawn. One or two, maybe, but it was getting on to the time where I either needed to pack it in and go or plan to make a night of it and hope he didn’t call the police when he found me on his couch in the morning.

I was still debating my limited options when I heard the distinct snick of a key in the front door lock. I threw a quick prayer up to the patron saint of stupid, lovelorn women that he hadn’t brought some chick home from the bar, and waited.

I hadn’t wanted him to call the police as soon as he pulled up, so I’d left the place dark when I’d helped myself to the spare key I knew he always kept tucked under the mat. He didn’t turn on any lights either, so he was just a shadowy figure standing in the doorway. Could’ve been anyone, I guess, except I knew it was Quentin. Five years with a man will make you remember tilt of his frame and the cant of his walk. And a whole lot of other things I didn’t want to be thinking about just yet. It was Quentin all right, and by the tight way he carried himself he had either jacked up his back again or he knew I was here.

“Little late for a visit, ain’t it, Rebecca?”
He knew it was me. “Hey, Quentin.”

Two months of trying to sort through the mess that was my life, two hours of sitting at his kitchen table, and that was the best I could come up with.

***

I like Rebecca and Quentin. I feel like I'm revisiting them after a long time away. So, I'm going to tuck myself into bed now (it's nearly 11 PM here on the east coast of the US) and finish reading their story. 
Good night.
(Seduce Me Tonight by Kristina Wright-- that's me!-- is available from all the usual ebook retailers.)

Dark Magic

By Lisabet Sarai

She's so gullible. Over Thanksgiving dinner (an unexpectedly wonderful feast at an atmospheric inn they'd stumbled upon, tucked away in the hills), he'd dropped hints about magical powers inherited from his Celtic ancestors. She'd swallowed his tale as eagerly as the turkey and the red wine, hanging on his words, focused on his face, wet (he knew) as she anticipated what might occur when they returned to his apartment. Her plump, perennially erect nipples teased him through her turtleneck jersey. His nipples, now, to play with, to torture, though perhaps she didn't think of them that way – not yet.

How had he managed to lure her here? He'd surprised himself with the success of his epistolary seduction. Before, in graduate school, they'd been only slightly more than friends. When he vanquished her at chess (despite the distraction of her bra-less state), there had been flickers of something less innocent in their interactions. Then he'd left, moved west, and one day, on a whim, written her a clever, flirtatious letter, fantasizing all the while about her lush breasts, parted lips and the nicely-rounded ass he'd never seen. He hadn't really expected her enthusiastic response, especially not when he broached topics like spanking, bondage, and melted wax. Clearly he'd been right to trust his intuition more than his intellect.

His bedroom is shadowed, lit by a single candle that spikes the air with patchouli. He hovers over her, weight balanced on his arms, the contrast between his big frame and her petite body making him worry. He wants to hurt her, but not in any way that causes damage. A half year's worth of fantasies – both the ones they've shared and the darker ones he doesn't dare expose – have him achingly hard. He jerks a bit, so his cockhead brushes her tangled pubic curls. They both shiver.

Her cunt draws him, but he resists that magnetic pull a while longer, making her wait for what she obviously wants. Control is difficult but necessary. He hasn't bound her (though there are holes drilled in the bed frame and a coil of rope ready in the bed table drawer). He hasn't marked her yet. Candlelight dapples her fair skin, previews of the stripes he hopes to leave there. Tonight though, there's just her voluptuous, eager body and his, primed by hours of self-abuse (the term seems apt, given the images that obsess him). They could be any pair of new lovers. But of course that's not true. What binds them together is more urgent than mere passion, darker than love.

She does not speak, though he has not enjoined her to silence. Her eyes are wide, riveted to his. When he finally allows himself to enter her juicy depths, she gasps, though he's on the down side of average in size. Still, the fit is tight and sweet – it stokes his fever. Pulling back, he rams into her, letting loose all the frustrations built up in month after month of solitary imaginings. He reads her face as he does, ready to stop if she seems to object. They are, after all, practically strangers, despite the explicit letters and breathless phone calls.

There's no resistance in her, though. She keeps her wrists crossed, arms above her head, exactly where he placed them. The position highlights those outrageous nipples she flaunts with such apparent unconcern. Leaning towards her, he catches one in his teeth. Her body ripples and her back arches, driving him deeper.

Fuck me, her eyes say. Use me. So he does, pounding her with his cock again and again, rough and raw, reveling in the slick grip of her cunt around his impossibly hard dick. His thrusts are brutal, but he hears no complaints. Amazed, almost disbelieving, he understands. She wants this as much as he does.

You're mine, he thinks, exulting in his power. He wills his cock to grow and swell. He wants to fill her completely, stretch her to her limits and beyond, tear her apart. It may be suggestion, but he feels huge inside her. Her eyes are pools of wonder.

It's all that he had imagined - no, better, because she's soaked and hungry and more open than he could have dreamed. Then unexpectedly, reality shifts. Some sort of psychic conduit opens between them. Her emotions flood his senses, her desperate need and her profound surrender. All at once, he really can hear her thoughts, and he knows, with complete certainty, that she can read his.

Mine. Mine!

Yes, yes – please...

Be still.

Her writhing ceases. Her tiny moans quiet. He ravages her with his gigantic cock and she takes it - willing, trusting, grateful.

She is truly his slave, bound by his command, and he is her born master, caring or cruel as it suits him. She has died for love of him, and he's taking his last pleasure from her still-warm corpse. He is the devil and she's the soul he has ensnared and lured into darkness.

Yes.

He comes with shout of triumph, pouring his seed into her welcoming heat. Her climax shimmers through her, and he feels that, too, the inevitable welling up of sensation so different from his own sharp release. For an instant he really can't tell which feelings and thoughts are his own and which belong to her.

A spark of fear – a flutter of rebellion – she pulls away from him the tiniest bit, reclaiming her will. The crystalline energy between them clouds. He does not fight the change. No one could bear the intensity of that connection for long. They lie in each other's arms, exhausted and groggy with joy.

The candle gutters and winks out. They sleep. He wakes a bit after dawn to find his bed empty. Did he imagine it all? Was this just another fantasy?

Rubbing his eyes, he wanders out of the bedroom. She is seated at the dining room table, naked in the pearly light of a foggy morning, writing in her journal. Her bowed neck speaks both of submission and strength. He sees that despite her tiny frame, she's anything but delicate.

Barefoot, he steals up behind her, cupping her luscious breasts, twirling her nipples. She leans back, with a sigh, her curly locks soft against his bare chest. He nips her earlobe, runs a wet tongue along the line of her jaw.

“What are you writing about, Sarah?” he asks, a bit afraid of the answer.

Her face is luminous as she turns to him.

“Magic.”

It's a Small World After All

I posted that last week on Facebook after I returned from a doctor's appointment. I've been having high blood pressure since Lucas was born and my doctor ordered several tests to determine the cause. An EKG and echocardiogram showed abnormalities with my heart (which may or may not explain the hypertension) and is referring me to a cardiologist. I was more annoyed by the time spent in waiting rooms lately than worried about what the tests meant and I intended my status as a joke--an attempt to make light of my annoyance at a serious situation. A broken heart. Ha ha. Romantic, no?

I was overwhelmed by all the comments and private messages that I received in response to that simple post. I was embarrassed by the attention. I hadn't meant for anyone to worry about me or spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what might amount to nothing serious. I had the same feelings of embarrassment when I posted several months ago that we were preparing to put our beloved dog to sleep. So many people commented or sent notes of support, that I felt silly for sharing my sad news with the world (or the 600 or so people I currently have on my friends list).

People joke about Facebook and Twitter, about the internet in general. But the social networks and the blogs bring us all closer. We share--and we over share. We learn. We educate. We empathize. We judge. We connect. It seems ridiculous to be thankful for the internet-- it seems... shallow, somehow. So be it. I am grateful for the internet. Go ahead, make fun of me. But if not for the internet, I wouldn't even know you were LOLing.

I honestly had no intentions of writing about Facebook or the internet when I chose the topic "Give Thanks." Yet here I sit on Thanksgiving night in the United States, connected to a world of people I have never met and people I've only met in person because I met them here first. I owe the bulk of my writing career to the internet, because so many of the connections I have made and the markets I have discovered have been because of websites and people I "met" via email.

The internet seems like such a cold, impersonal thing and it certainly can be when you're talking in terms of URLs and apps and browsers and the like. But there are faces behind the terms, lives behind the screens, real emotions behind every emoticon. (And imagine how grateful the @ symbol must be! Who used it before the internet existed?) So many people behind these screens have touched my life, both personally and professionally. I will always be grateful for that.

When Steve Jobs died, the cynics criticized the millions who mourned his death. There are people dying in anonymity all over the world, they said, and yet we mourn the loss of one very rich man. But it is people like Steve Jobs that have made it possible for us all to connect so easily. Through these connections we create awareness about issues beyond our own neighborhoods. We discover the world is filled with people just like us struggling with all the same problems and we reach out in whatever way we can to offer whatever we can. Sometimes, it's an "I'm thinking of you," comment on a Facebook page. Sometimes, it's more. Lives have been saved because of the internet.

When I posted my heartbroken status on Facebook, I was thinking I was grateful for health care that comes at an affordable cost because of my husband's military status. When I got such a heartwarming (no pun intended) response from people, most of whom don't know me personally, I was thinking about how grateful I was for the kindness of friends and strangers and strangers who have become friends. I am grateful for all of those things and so much more, including a family I love and a career I adore. But after my husband and my children and the other people who are closest to me in my real life, my life has been most affected by this:

That space above represents the internet. That place exists only because the technology exists. And that space can be filled with anything I choose-- surprise kittens, talking dogs, college classes, entire novels, every retail store in existence, WebMD to research my heart condition, knowledge on any subject under the sun (including the sun), parenting advice, recipes, friendships, relationships, new writing markets and, oh yeah, porn. That space is everything we know and everything we don't and everything we wish we knew that we once struggled to find information on-- but is now at the tips of our fingers. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic (in which case, I will blame it on the wine), the internet has changed my life.

I have met the lovely Grippers thanks to the internet. Every erotica story I've ever sold has been to a market I found via the internet (most often on the Erotica Readers and Writers Association website). The internet (specifically Skype) made it possible for my oldest son to get to know his father even though my husband was several thousand miles away for the first several months of his life. The internet bridges distances, physical, political and philosophical. It connects people. It has connected me to so many wonderful, amazing, inspiring people.

I am thankful for so many things in my life. I am grateful to you, whoever you are, for reading my OGG columns. For caring enough to remember my name, for taking the time to follow a link to my blog or my Facebook page or my books. For making this connection-- THIS ONE RIGHT HERE-- that bridges the distance between me in Virginia in the U.S. and you, wherever you are. If only for a few fleeting moments here on the screen, we are connected. This opportunity didn't exist twenty-five years ago when I was in high school and computer classes were cataloged as math classes. This is something amazing. And I am grateful I live in this era and am a part of it. Thank you for joining me on this amazing ride. Thank you for reading my words.

Oh, and if you'd care to tell me where you are and what you're thankful for, that would be really cool, too.

Let Us Give Thanks

Thanksgiving is a time of family, fun and food. We always schedule our get togethers to be able to have one celebration with my family and one with my wife’s. Yep, that’s a whole lot of eating, but oddly enough I’m alright with that.

It seems with all the demands of life, it’s a rare event to get everyone in the same place at the same time even for a meal. So, I’m particularly thankful for this holiday for providing just such a venue. True, I still don’t get to see all of my family (we’re scattered across the country) every year, but it give me an opportunity to catch up with folks I only get to see every few months and we get to do it while surrounded by tons of food, glorious food.

The first half of the day usually starts out with a menu along the lines of this:

Turkey
Stuffing
Ham,
Green bean casserole
Candied Yams
Potato Salad (with mustard, mayo, onions, eggs, pickles, and garlic)
Mac Salad (with Velveeta, mayo, garlic and onions)
Ziti
An assortment of breads and rolls
Upside down cake
Dirt Cake
Pumpkin Pie
Apple Pie

The second half wraps up with:

Prime Rib
Mashed potatoes and Gravy
Stuffing
Green beans (with bacon and onions)
Cranberry sauce
Deviled Eggs
Rolls
Cheesecake
And an assortment of Pies.

And yes, I try to eat a little bit of everything and more than I should of others. It usually takes me about a week to recover from all the food, but it is totally worth every extra mile I have to run.

So, what’s the standard fare at your house?