Family Tradition

How does your family celebrate Thanksgiving? Mine goes out into the woods.

We spend actual Thanksgiving Day doing the more traditional things. We wake up and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade while we lazily drink coffee and chocolate milk. We casually take our time getting ready for the day's parties, and sometimes we cook in the morning. Then, as Santa gets closer, we load up in the car and drive to our first stop, my grandma's house. We eat crazy amounts of food that my aunts, uncles, cousins, have made. We throw the football around a bit, then we pile up in the car again to have dessert with Nana Clover's family. Then, the real holiday celebrations begin.

We load the car up one more time and drive to the cabin out in the woods by a lake. Some of my other aunts and uncles have cabins close by as well, and we have a campfire and play and sit outside the entire day after. There is no shopping. We are not one of those "Make a mad dash to the store" type of families. Instead, we roast hot dogs and marshmellows, eat lots of snack foods, and (this is the best part) we shoot each other with paintball guns.

Now, I would like to state that for the most part, my family is a family of doves. With that in mind, my family also has quite a few former and current military men. Maybe that's why we enjoy the paintballing as much as we do. Plus, it kinda harks back to the days when pioneers had to go and hunt down the Thanksgiving day turkey. Little Clover even got into the paintballing this year (despite the protesting and worrying of his mom). He donned some gear and dueled with Papa Clover. Little Clover won.

We also walked along the bank of the lake, skipping rocks and looking at tracks. Little Clover put on a lively dance for us while shaking the pancake batter. We even got in a game of Scrabble.

In between paintballing, football throwing, and hot dog roasting, I managed to work on a scarf for a charity auction and an entrelac sock.


The sock is knitted with Trekking XXL in 104. The colors are amazing and seem to be made for entrelac. The changes between each section are perfect. I'm not really using a pattern. I found a cuff down entrelac sock online, but the entrelac stops when you get to the heel. I'm knitting these two-up with a short row heel. I thought the diagonal seem on the heel would compliment the entrelac. I'm just now trying to figure out how to rejoin the heel stitches without disturbing the pattern.


The charity scarf is a simple double crochet that I crochet longways. I have no idea what the yarn brand is. The colorway though is called Parrot. I found it deep in my stash and it was one of my first parchuses from a real yarn store. It came in a huge hank and I used exactly one hank. The only scraps I had left where the clippings from trimming up the fringe. Good karma!