Thanksgiving with Friends

Thanksgiving is Bo's absolute most favorite holiday, so we really make the most of it. When we got married a few years ago, we decided to host a potluck Thanksgiving dinner with our friends, since we were the only married couple and therefore the only ones who had enough space for everyone and all of the appropriate supplies (thank you, wedding registry!). It's been such a fun tradition with our group of friends. We ask everyone to contribute something to the meal, and we all enjoy trying everyone else's recipes and seeing how similar or different everyone's family traditions are.

We love hosting events, and this time we had 23 people over for dinner! It was our largest crowd yet, as the number of "significant others" continues to increase and now that Ginny & JM are finally back in Atlanta. And we still have just a little more room to grow for the next event, if needed. We even brought out the fine china for the occasion, which was a first (I may have just a little Monica Geller in me when it comes to my china). Dinner was quite an enormous feast. Everyone did such a great job and it was all so delicious. Bo and I spent a majority of Saturday preparing the meats and got up way too early (in my opinion) on Sunday to start cooking them and getting the house ready for everyone to come over later that afternoon.  Bo cooked the turkey in his laser fryer (a-mazing!) and the special this year was a massive tenderloin. Since he was using the fryer and the grill, it was so nice to have the oven open all day for everything else.

Fried Turkey

Grilled Tenderloin

Drew and Lizzy dressed up in these awesome costumes for the event, so we had a few pilgrims join us!

Chris and Shawn were really sweet and brought me flowers :)

Everyone finally enjoying the meal we all put together...

yours truly :)

the all-couples table: Ginny & JM, Jessica & Josh, Bo & me, Lauren & Shawn

the all-girls table: Katie, Ana, Shara, Sarah, Kim, Margaret & EJ

the hodge-podge table: Drew & Lizzy, Matt, Chris, Nick & Jenna

Until we started hosting dinners ourselves, I never truly realized just how much work it takes. It makes me that much more appreciative of all the years I've gone to Grandma's house for the holidays - especially since she does everything by herself (except for the desserts, which my mom makes). It is very impressive! Hopefully she'll teach me a few of her tricks when we are with her for Christmas :) hint, hint Grandma...!! One thing I secretly love about hosting events is that it gives me a good excuse to move around the furniture and do a really good cleaning of the house a few times a year. I know, call me crazy, but I do love it. Bo thinks I clean too much in general (again, I might be crazy...), but I guess in his mind having guests over to our house justifies my cleaning frenzies. Although in my experience I have learned that it is really best to just do basic cleaning before the event, and save the deep cleaning until after the event. It tends to last a bit longer :)

Later today we are packing up the car and heading up to Blowing Rock, NC for the real holiday tomorrow. We are spending the rest of the week with Bo's family, and we are doing a similar potluck Thanksgiving dinner, so our dinner with friends was good practice for us :)  After the big meal on Thursday, Bo's parents are celebrating their 30th anniversary on Friday, and then Bo's birthday is on Saturday! It's going to be one heck of a week and we are very much looking forward to it!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!