Thanksgiving 2009

After a string of four consecutive years spending the holiday at our cabin on Orcas Island, we stayed home this year. And the experience was different in every way.

Instead of preparing the meal ourselves and enjoying the smell of roast turkey filling the house, we set the alarm at 6:30 so we could get an early start on packing. With only two days left to prepare for moving day, we had to spend the day emptying cabinets, filling boxes and moving furniture onto the main floor for tomorrow's moving sale.

Hardly the way you want to spend your favorite holiday -- one that's rich with meaning and pretty much devoid of the commercial overkill that taints Christmas.

Thanks to our good friends Sue and Eric Wilcox, we knew we could take a break in the early afternoon to join their extended family and friends for a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. There were 20 seats at the table and we were mighty grateful to fill two of them. The food was delicious, surpassed only by their generosity.

Simone joined Kyndall on a visit to her mother's house in central Washington. Jordan and Jamie celebrated a day early and then hit the road today, aiming to arrive in Stockton, Calif., (about an hour south of Sacramento) to spend the night with one of Jamie's relatives. Nathan slept in, packed some stuff, then joined some friends later in the evening.

Even if we hadn't been preparing to move this year, I'm thinking it might have been just three of us -- Nathan, Lori and me -- at the cabin. We'll see what next year brings.

For now, it's enough to look forward to moving into our new home Saturday. We actually get the keys tomorrow, so if all goes well we might be able to take a few things over a day early.