Make your own head day

Jack and Jill magazine june 1967

I think it would be cuter to attach these features to a fruit shaped face instead of the generic human one making them look more like the official "funny faces"....and hats, they need hats!

Crisco's Plantation Pecan Pie

{Household Magazine June 1951}

For our Thanksgiving dinner I did make a "real" dessert other than the frozen pumpkin pie.  Mr. Husband has some hang up with eating things that taste good so the pumpkin pie is just for me.

I made him this interesting raisin and nut pie instead.  The recipe calls for pecans but they are about 100 bucks an ounce so I used walnuts instead.  I also used golden raisins because they are 100 times better tasting that those old brown yesterday's news raisins.

  

 I even made the crust and didn't tweak anything.  The whipped topping is generic cool whip that I put in a piping bag.

The pie was really good, a bit dry for me though.  Mr. Husband loved it and has placed an order for another! 

Antenna time

 

Mr. Husband and I love to be able to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade but for the past many years we are never able to watch it in entirety.  It's either we are dealing with Thanksgiving dinner prep nonsense or we are vacationing at a cabin that doesn't have TV service.  We can't even watch in our own home because we don't have cable and it's not livestreamed.  The photo above is the decorating I do on our TV with a vintage image of the parade to just give us the illusion we are watching.

This year to go along with our TV Dinner theme and because we were tired of constantly missing the parade we broke down and bought an antenna!  

Yep...We've moved into the 2010s.  Of course we then realized that not all of the parade is amazing balloons and marching bands.  There's a crap load of crap performers "singing" crap.... We also bought a universal remote and the mute button works great.

Heat and Serve!

For many years I have said that I would be fine if for Thanksgiving we all just had TV Dinners.  This came from countless years of agony and anxiety over the nightmare that was always our family Thanksgivings.  It was the kind of thing that could have become the storyline for a Griswold's Family Thanksgiving without the comedy.  Someone not buying enough basic supplies which then meant  having to fight the other nincompoops at the one grocery store that's open for a stick of overpriced vegan crap butter because it's all that's left or having to bake 10 pies in one oven and having no counter space because the counter is already piled up with unitasker kitchen gadgets coated in an inch of dust....   I honestly hated Thanksgiving and really do have some sort of form of PTSD over it.  For the past 5 years we have finally been able to make some changes and lessen the nightmare even being able to enjoy the holiday, making it our own.  

So this year I decided to do a Thanksgiving theme based after my at-the-end-of -my-rope declaration of the past "I would rather just have a TV Dinner than put up with this thanksgiving nonsense!"

Here is the sideboard in the dining room in Heat and Serve mode:

I printed the large posters at our library back before the pandemic.  They used to have a Large Format Print night a couple of times a month that was free.  

Even though the theme was TV dinners I did make us the traditional meal only I do it simple and easy out of all convenience foods.  It's instant mashed potatoes, stove top stuffing, premade rolls, canned cranberry sauce, frozen peas, and even jar gravy.  We never eat this kind of stuff so that makes it a treat.  I did bake the turkey but that's super easy.

To make the theme really play out I decided to plate our meal looking all TV dinner-fied:

I bought some cheap aluminum baking pans from dollar tree and made the dividers out of foil wrapped cardboard.

And for dessert?  A frozen premade pumpkin pie!

 

Thanksgiving Decor 2021

This year for Thanksgiving I just kept the decorating to the dining room since that's where the action happens.

This is the top of a metal cabinet near the front window.

The top of the china cabinet.

The table centerpiece.

On the primary wall and side board I decided to try out something that I have been wanting to start doing for several years now.  I would like to have this area feature a new Thanksgiving theme each year.  I printed out some of the materials I wanted to use for the first theme but wasn't ever able to do the rest since the library hasn't been doing wide format print night anymore since covid.  But I am just going to use what I do have and go for it.  Reveal in next post!   

Burned Meatball Cookies

This lady might be seen as having a bad day with burning her meatball cookies.  Add in maybe that the thin little square of TP she is using to take the hot pan out of the oven then catches fire and she suffers third degree burns on her hand.  Also when she opens the window to let out the smoke a swarm of wasps flood the kitchen and she just so happens to be deathly allergic to them.

I would say that this has been the way my life has been going for the past 18 months but it's not even close.  This lady's problems are her own fault because she forgot to set a timer.  My disappointments, issues,  and tragedies have all been caused by nothing I did or didn't do, and they come constantly out of no where.  If I was a superstitious person  (I'm just a little stitious) I would think someone has a voodoo doll with my name on it. 

I'm trying to make light of this because MhiCTy is not a place for sadness or depression.  Nobody including myself wants to read or relive it.  To lay it out in blog terms I didn't do anything for Halloween until Oct 28 and it was minimal (hoping to post those soon).  I have something small planned for Thanksgiving and Christmas has nothing.  I have no theme this year.  If you know me and this blog you can translate that fairly easily with my emotional state.  I am sure that when Dec rolls around I will do something but I don't know what that is right now.  I've been conditioned because of this past year and a half to not plan on anything...not even cleaning the bathroom because that becomes the day I happen to quickly drop into Hobby Lobby for 5 minutes and wind up with a corneal abrasion from a random fleck of something that came out of nowhere.  That was just one of my last week's ordeals.  This week I just long for simple burned meatball cookies...