My Thomas Kinkade Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in Hawaii--I always LUBBED it! The comings and the goings. The hap hap happy happenings.  The endless ebb and flow of neighbors coming in and out of our day. 

Thanksgiving in Hawaii was just like every other day in the hood, only with Turkey and pie.

(See, when you live in a townhouse far far away, your neighbors are your ohana, which means family, and family means no one gets left alone.)

(Ever.) 

(Even if you scream "LEAVE me ALONE!" at the top of your lungs.)

On the other hand, when you live in a single family home close close at hand, your neighbors are not your ohana. Your ohana is your ohana, and the last thing anyone around here needs is more ohana.

So this year we spent Thanksgiving with our very own ohana for the first time in 20 years. 

And it was sooooo weird--in a magical-hot-apple-cider-roaring-cozy-fire kinda way. 

For a second I thought I was living inside a Thomas Kinkade puzzle.

I've always wondered what the people inside these charming cottages do all day. 

And now I know.  They are listening to the Carpenters Christmas album and baking hot buttered rolls and devouring Black Friday ads.  And their kids are making gingerbread houses and playing Madden 09 and watching the Macy's Day Parade. And their ohana is dropping by, in and out they come, bearing smiles and hugs and fruit salad with chocolate whipped cream.

I wonder if Thomas Kinkade realizes there is such a thing as chocolate whipped cream and that people inside his puzzles are putting it on their fruit salad?   

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think chocolate whipped cream is a Mormon thing because I'm pretty sure my apostate brother thought it up himself  (WHO does that?)  And when he couldn't find any chocolate whipped cream in the grocery store (because DUH! no one has invented it yet because EWW!) he took matters into his own hands with a bottle of Hershey's syrup and some cool whip and then he forced us all at gunpoint to eat it.  

And doggonit, it was delicious. And we liked it. 

But still . . . kinda kooky.

And he's not even my kookiest brother.  I have another brother who runs his car on vegetable oil that he gets from a sushi shop.  And when he drives it smells like french fries.  

True story. The universe is a little bit more at risk for high cholesterol because of my kooky brother.

So if my Dumb and Dumber cooking blog doesn't make me rich and my Windex cologne doesn't make me famous, I'm going to start a sushi shop gas station. Only instead of making sushi I'll make SPAM musubi and instead of pumping vegetable oil, I'll pump soy sauce. That way the universe will crave fried rice, which is lower in saturated trans fat.

So anyways, I had a weird thanksgiving--in a magical-hot-apple-cider-roaring-cozy-fire kinda way. And I even learned something new about darning socks from my mother-in-law.  In fact everyone at the table learned something new about darning socks from my mother-in-law. 

Did you know that darning socks involves a needle and thread? 

And all these years I thought I was darning my holey socks to helk by simply screaming at them. 

P.S. Black Friday stories tomorrow . . .