It’s a little late for a post about Thanksgiving, considering it was almost two weeks ago but here it is anyway.

I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a better Thanksgiving in my life.  I think that I’ve also gained a new appreciation for family get-togethers.  This past Thanksgiving was like many others, my family got together with my mom’s side of the family one day and my dad’s side another day. (It’s great to space out the meals.  I have no idea how it works when you have to do multiple meals on the same day like they always show in the movies.)  The meals were predictable fare, just what you would expect from a Thanksgiving meal.  Maybe it’s because I was in Costa Rica last year for Thanksgiving and have missed many of the family get-togethers recently, but this year I was defiantly more thoughtful this year than in the past.  It was really cool for me to see both sides of my family, to remember where I come from, and the different characteristics that I get from both sides.

It was, and is, also slightly strange to think about where I was and what I was doing a year ago.  I was celebrating Thanksgiving in a different country with a family, who had never celebrated it before and were astounded by the amount of food involved.  I was getting ready to go to Panama to live on an island with an indigenous tribe who don’t speak English and who speak very little Spanish.  It seems a little crazy now, almost as if I never actually did it.  But I did.  Sometimes I wonder if I remember all that I learned during that semester, if it has affected who I am today or if I’ve simply returned to who I was before I left.  I must admit that it can feel at times like it was a completely different person who went and did all those things, flew to a different country, lived with different families, talked to so many different people in a different language.

It’s good to go home, to remember where you came from, to be surrounded by the people who care about you and are a part of who you’ve become.  It’s good to see where you get your traits and your quirks, the good and the bad, and to see what you’d like to keep and what you’d like to change about yourself.  Like one trait I’d like to develop is being more hospitable.  On Thanksgiving my Aunt went to a local race and she and her sister met two servicemen there who had nowhere to go for dinner so, they brought them home.  They hung out with our family and became, for that brief evening, a part of the family.  It was a great Thanksgiving.

Other things that I’m thankful for are a beautiful place to live and plenty of snow to enjoy.  This past weekend brought with it about two feet of snow.  It started snowing on Thursday and didn’t let up until Sunday afternoon.  It was so much fun to go out and play and then to come back in and be able to curl up with a good book and watch the snow come down in huge fluffly flakes.

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