Tradition

Tradition.

That's what I think of when I start preparing for Thanksgiving. Mostly because of Nan, my grandmother. Tomorrow I make the stuffing. Nan's bread stuffing has been handed down to my generation for quite a few years now. She learned how to make it from her mother, and probably her mother taught her. 

I was talking with Nan tonight and asking her about the recipe. 

Because there is NO other stuffing that tastes this good. At least not for our family. And I wanted as many details about this recipe as I could get.

Nan remembers her mother toasting the bread in the stove because they didn't have toasters then. For the Thanksgiving stuffing, her mother would slice three loaves from the 10-15 loaves of bread she would have made for the week. Then she toasted the slices in the stove for a long time. That's what Nan said, it took a long time to toast the bread.

It takes me about 45 minutes to toast three loaves of bread in my toaster. I bet my great-grandmother was quicker with the stove.

Nan also remembers toasting slices of bread on top of the stove for breakfast, slathering them with butter. That was real food. Real bread and real butter, no preservatives. No wonder she thinks the food tasted better when she was a kid. It had to. There weren't any preservatives or chemicals in it.

Tradition is a funny thing. You don't even know you're creating tradition until lots of years later.

So when the little girls were sleeping over this past weekend, and we made pumpkin chip muffins for breakfast,  I showed E. how to level the flour. And she showed me how to stir the batter, making sure you go around the bowl once or twice and then up through the middle a couple times. That makes sure you get all the stuff in the middle, Auntie. Mommy said that's how your mommy showed her how to stir batter.

Yup, tradition.

A tradition I started a few years ago was finding a Christmas craft and doing it after we finished Thanksgiving dinner.  I was going to use these cute little snowglobe ornaments, but I couldn't wait. They were looking too cute in my mind and I had to see them come to life. 

They're pretty simple and the girls had fun putting their scenes together. You can find the instructions here. 

Rats. Now I have to find another Christmas craft for Thursday.

Leave me a comment with some of your family traditions. I'd love to hear about them.