The sun's been known to shine on our wandering kind

The sweet potatoes were baked for an hour this afternoon, microwaved another fifteen minutes after that (because they had been listening, clearly, to the Scheherazade pie), and then puréed with maple syrup, coconut milk, chipotles that had been soaking in water since eight o'clock in the morning, and cinnamon, and if you will not take my word that they came out deliciously, derspatchel was my co-chef and we were kind of fighting over the spatula as the last of the purée was scraped out of the Cuisinart into the serving bowl. It was the last dish to be finished before the meal—as in, my mother had to call us up from ransacking the record collection to deal with it before the turkey could come out of the oven—and I should remember it in future, because it was a lot less dicing-intensive than the squash gratin (which I am pleased with, but it was the kind of dish where the squash is steaming while the garlic and shallots are softening in the olive oil and I'm chopping the parsley and sage to stir in with the cream and the two kinds of Swiss cheese I have to grate next) and there is a lot less left of it right now. The pumpkin pie that took forever is apparently the best we've made in years. Of the two apple pies, the disaster pie—the crust collapsed and the apples underneath started to dry out, so I dumped half a bottle of Halloween spiced cider in through the broken pastry and gave it up for lost—naturally turned out the far superior, to the point where I feel vaguely guilty about serving the other one first. And then somehow we also had zucchini rolls and two kinds of stuffing and spanakopita and my brother brought over an extra skewer of bacon-wrapped shrimp from his Thanksgiving dinner hosting his wife's family and there is a lot of food in this house, I thought it was going to be a low-key sort of cooking year and I think somebody missed the memo. Possibly me. I regret nothing, especially the sweet potatoes.

Or the rest of the day. This was a good Thanksgiving. I don't mean that all the food was done on time and nobody had fights with anybody else, although these things are true. I mean that I slept till half past noon and dreamed about being shown around the backstage of Sesame Street about twenty-five years ago, which was pure conjecture on the part of my brain. My cousin Tristen is spending the holiday with his father in Vermont, but his grandparents—my aunt and uncle—are staying through Saturday and enthused very loudly over the football game, which seems to have been epic. My brother had a work week from hell and in-laws from noon onward and still came for dinner, not just a dessert flyby. We listened to "Alice's Restaurant." (About half of it in live stereo, because of Rob.) It was the first Thanksgiving with neither of my grandparents living and we toasted those present and those in memory. It just all worked.

Have a stupidly adorable photograph of Peter Cushing and his wife Helen courtesy of handful_ofdust. I am, quite contentedly, going to bed.

P.S. Oh, there's even new preview Lackadaisy. I am thankful for Tracy Butler.