On Thanksgiving Day
Families gather to eat
Far more than they should . . .

A Photorecord of Thanksgiving 2003

Introduction:  It's a 6-hour drive from my apartment to my parents' house.  All but the last 4 minutes of it is on pavement.  My parents live down this gravel road a mile to the west of my hometown.

The family gathered far, far too early for my tastes.  Of course, "too early for my tastes" is pretty much anything before 3 p.m. or so . . .

Two families were engaged elsewhere, so we had a smaller Thanksgiving than usual.  It was still a lot of people.

More people gathering.

Oh, look, more people gathering.

The cooks, hard at work.

More cooking.  I always feel bad because I don't contribute as much to the cooking process as I feel I should (although I did make a pie!), but I console myself with the fact that my mother and my grandmother cater suppers for hundreds of people as a side business, so dinner for 30 people is a walk in the park for them.

Hey, it's time to eat.  I guess this was the "kiddie table," although everyone in the family is old enough now that there's not much stigma to it.  (I ate at the adult table, though.)

So did my brother (how he made it to the adult
table is beyond me . . .).

Preparing to overeat.

I really don't understand the whole "Hey, let's eat until we're uncomfortable and we have to unbutton our pants!" thing.  I'm kind of a spoilsport because I take normal portions of everything.  I guess it's my little rebellion against tradition.  It also means I get to hit the dessert table first . . .

The dessert table.

I made the berry pie with the grid pattern
(I think there's an actual word for that type of pie top, but I don't know what it is).

My mom made six pies in the time it took me to make one . . .

Dinner is over.  Let's do something fun, like drag out the photo albums.

It was around this time that Linde, my dearest
oldest-younger sister (although I guess I only have one oldest-younger sister, so she's both my dearest and least-dear oldest-youngest sister), made fun of the size of my head when I was a baby (at great length).

She's getting a brick for Christmas.

I made my family a custom Monopoly board as a surprise Thanksgiving present.  The official "Cooper-opoly" game has custom property squares featuring the family's possessions and interests, neatly captured by my camera, printed on my photo printer and stuck to the board (among them my father's business, my apartment, my brother's truck and Haley's softball team).  It also has money with our faces and "Good News/Bad News" cards featuring events from the family's travels.  Everyone thought it was pretty cool.

No one wanted to play it.  We played cards for three hours instead.

"Look, Haley is the $100 bill."

I'm not the only one taking pictures.

I'm the only one taking pictures with a digital camera who puts them up on the Web for the entire world to see, though.

Hi mom.

My brother demonstrates one of his dignified poses.

The girls play around.

Time to pose for pictures.

This is my uncle's family.  All of his kids are like 9 feet tall (they get it from their mother).  The average height for the rest of my family is like 4 feet, so they make the rest of us feel short.

My sisters.  Both of them.  Including my dearest youngest sister, and my dearest eldest-younger sister.

Linde is probably going to try to kill me for
putting this picture on the Internet.  But
I'm still bigger than she is.

Some people have the right idea.

The next day.

As a tradition, my mother and I hang the Christmas lights on her house the day after Thanksgiving.  This involves my mother going through the strings of lights that don't work and shaking them until they work while I balance on a stepladder.  It's lots of fun.

In the meantime, my dad and my brother went to work.  We stopped by to offer moral support.

They were working inside.
Which was good, because . . .

. . . the wind was blowing.  You'd be surprised at how often the wind blows in western Nebraska.  It's almost like it's a giant, near-desert, tree-less region.  Go figure.