I want to put it all between two slices of bread

(Weeeeee! Pictures!)

It's over.

The Thanksgiving hoopla, ballyhoo, and conviviality has come to an end for another year. Mr. C's turkey dinner was a great success, the cheesecake was heralded as restaurant quality (thank you, BA, for that incredible recipe!) and amazingly enough, though we blended two families under one roof, no one insulted anyone else's delicate sensibilities. I thank the liberal amount of wine that was poured for the later and much research and great recipes for the former two.

The amount of wine is proportionate to the happy moments a family experiences during the holidays.

It came as no surprise that my father decided that any joke worth making once was worth repeating 25 more times. Because as anyone knows a joke gets funnier the more times you tell it. And a horse becomes more dead the more times you beat it.

In this case it was our decision to use a laptop to work off of instead of a recipe book.

Alton Brown, eat your heart out.

(As a quick aside, can I just tell you how great it is to be married to a guy who is 50% geek and 50% renaissance man? Not only can he fix a computer but he makes a mean sage, sausage and apple dressing and cranberry compote. How cool is that? But I digress.)

These are a few of my favorite things.

Not only did my father comment on the laptop next to the stove at least 18 different times he also could not wrap his brain around the fact that I made a cheesecake from scratch and prepared some of the side dishes with my own two hands.

Say cheese....CAKE!

"You can cook? No. That's not possible. You can't cook anything that doesn't come from a can. Har Har Hardee Har."

Did I say no one was insulted? I lied a little.

No bother, I'm used to it.

We all did have a very good time and I'll spare you the rest of the details, because our details are probably a lot like your details; We ate a lot, we drank a lot, we talked and laughed a lot, we got frustrated with each other at times and there are leftovers for days. Sound familiar?

This pumpkin bread is great mom, don't pay any attention to what Pappy says.

The turkey looked good, too, but these graham crackers are better.

I hope you and your's ate enough turkey to sedate a moose. I hope you ingested your weight in pie. I hope you watched more football than you ever wanted to see in your whole life. I hope you enjoyed a leftover turkey sandwich half as good as the one that my husband just lovingly prepared for me. And I hope you have someone in your life who will willingly put down the other tasty sandwich they so lovingly prepared for themselves before even taking a bite to kill a hornet because they know you won't. A hornet that they fear above all other things.

Chivalrous and he can cook. I told you that husband of mine, he's a renaissance man.