Happy Thanksgiving everybody! We had a great Thanksgiving Eve bonfire last night, pictured above! I love having a teen son who can build huge fires! I also love having bonfires. So far we’ve done it on Christmas Eve, All Hallow’s Eve, and Thanksgiving Eve! Also when my brother-in-law visited. I love having a fire pit! The picture below shows our mountain view from the fire pit. You can barely see a speck of the moon at the top of the picture below.

So by moonlight and firelight, we ate pie with maple syrup sweetened whip cream. Yum, yum, yum! I cheated on the prep work and bought some pies (you know, the 80/20 rule, where you eat whole food 80% of the time. Sometimes I think, if the kids don’t care and it doesn’t affect their behavior, I will buy the less-than-pure food for them, to save time, true confessions!) I made apple crisp for me. It’s so much easier to make than pie! I couldn’t find my trusty recipe from Diane Hopkins over at lovetolearn.net so I winged it and it turned out great! Recipe coming soon!

I let the kids do mock sword-fighting (with padded swords) outside by firelight while I gave them a Thanksgiving gift of doing the dishes. Usually they do them. To make the chores fun for me I listened to the lastest Trim Healthy Mama podcast about how to get through the holidays without getting derailed on your diet plans. It was good! I like all the tactics they gave. Then we watched The Mouse on the Mayflower and Monumental. It’s so wonderful to be reminded of how persistent the Pilgrims were, as told in Monumental. So many forces conspired against them. In the documentary, Kirk interviewed an expert on Pilgrim history who described all their setbacks. Here they are:

• The head of their government in England, King James, was a tyrant who wanted people to only follow his religion, the Church of England. They had to meet in secret to have church meetings
• They could have have been arrested for reading the Bible in their own language, English.
• So they go to Holland, for religious freedom. During the first attempt, the captain of the ship betrayed them into the hands of the government, so they had to spend time in jail
• On the next attempt, however, only the husbands/fathers could go.
• Then they were caught in a storm while on the boat that lasted two weeks.  The storm abated which allowed the men to finally get to Holland
• It took a whole year before the wives and children could join them. Then the Pilgrims built a printing press to print pamphlets to teach others about the Bible and Christ. Then authorities from King James came and destroyed the printing press.
• When the Pilgrims came back to England and then decided to go the New World, their first ship sprang a leak. So they had to come back and get a different ship.

Whew, all that before they even got to Plymouth! That was just the beginning of all their hardships. It is truly amazing that they had the tenacity to press forward. I’m so grateful they did. I am grateful for their example of self-government according to what they felt was best in worshiping God. Perhaps God gave them all those challenges before they got to the New World to prepare them for even more challenges. I don’t think any of those challenges were just coincidences. I look back on my life and see the hand of God in my trials. They weren’t simply coincidences.

Here’s a story that involves so-called coincidences that I know will warm your hearts this Thanksgiving Day. It involves some mixed-up mail, a common surname, long-lost twins, and reunited cousins and siblings. It all happened around November, culminating in a joyous family reunion on Thanksgiving Day! All from a catalog sent to the “wrong” address! God definitely works through mysterious ways, even with catalogs and the postal system! The story is called “A Catalog of Events”, by Janet Kruckenberg. It appeared in the June 1994 Ensign. I have reprinted some of it below this photo below.

(reprinted from the June 1994 Ensign):

When I answered the phone, a man’s voice on the other end of the line asked my name and told me his, saying that a mail order catalog with my name on it had arrived in his mail. He asked if I had ordered the catalog or if I wanted it. I told him I didn’t and that I had no idea why my name was on it. We would have hung up then if the caller hadn’t said something else.

There’s so much more to the story! Please see the rest of the article here.