Giving Thanks

In honor of Thanksgiving, I wrote down some things that I am thankful for:

I am thankful for my health, which I should be taking care of more often.

I am thankful for my husband, who is a wonderful friend and the best partner I can ask for.

I am thankful for my family and friends, whose love and support I cherish and treasure.

I am also thankful for stores like TJ Maxx, who always manage to offer great fashion at affordable prices. Check out my latest purchase:

Lately I have been having a love affair with flat shoes, and this pair is the perfect shade of cobalt that I have been searching for: a fine royal blue with a tinge of purple. I’ll be wearing this throughout the fall and winter months to jazz up my wardrobe.

This year we celebrated Thanksgiving at my mom’s house. Thanksgiving is an adopted holiday for us (we are originally from the Philippines), one that we’ve embraced throughout the years. Because it’s an adopted holiday, the food we serve are a little bit different. By different I mean that we are not bound to the traditional fare: turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, pumpkin pie, etc. Certainly we have some of those elements in our meal every year but sometimes we’ll substitute ham for turkey (sometimes turkey is just too dry!) and add a little something different to the mix. This year we had what I’ll call wieners-cheese-and-marshmallow on a stick. Behold my masterpiece:


So basically I’ve strung cubes of cheese, miniature wieners, pineapple, and marshmallow along a bamboo stick and stuck the stick into a head of cabbage. Back in the Philippines my mom used to make these works of art for our birthday parties, except that hot dogs were used instead of wieners and the sticks were stuck to a pineapple. I don’t know how these seemingly random ingredients were brought together to create this food but I can tell you they’re as familiar to me as pumpkin pie is to Thanksgiving. I wish I could show you pictures from past birthday parties to illustrate my point. I ate a ton of these yesterday, while putting them together and throughout the day. I might need to buy some new pants to tide me over until the holidays are over.

While I’m on the subject of things that we do a little bit differently on Turkey Day, here’s another one that sticks out: instead of watching the Thanksgiving Day parade and football games (which we used to watch before the advent of The Filipino Channel), we watch whatever programming is being shown on The Filipino Channel (TFC). During Thanksgiving lunch, they were airing a game show:


This channel is what my parents watch 90% of the time. Personally, I’ve grown to like it over the years because it gives me a glimpse of Filipino life that I don’t see anywhere here in the US. By watching TFC I learn about what Filipinos in the Philippines like to watch and the current events that they care about. I’m hoping this information will help me connect with my relatives, whom I will be visiting this coming May. I can’t wait to see how my aunts, uncles, and cousins look like – it’s been a long time since we’ve gotten together. Hopefully I’ll surprise them with my intimate knowledge of the most popular soap operas and famous celebrities.