Thanksgiving 2015 :: Best One Yet.

(Missing five of our favorite people, who left before I remembered to take a picture!)

Last year was our very first Thanksgiving here in Finland. Not only that, it was our very first go at making any sort of thanksgiving dishes from start to finish (other than desserts.)

So, to have our first go in a country that had zero of the packaged food items we were used to using presented us a fun challenge. (Last year our parents sent us some stove top for safety precautions.)

This year, we went ahead and mustered up our boldness and did it all from scratch. The group we had invited last year had grown to an even wider group as well. Over the course of the year we got better skills, and we got more friends. 

So with 20 some people on the roster, Ben and I searched all of Finland for a turkey (located conveniently at Stockmann), and made all the fixings. We left the desserts to our guests and took care of the savory. One family had a sick kid (much sadness about that...), but the rest were able to make it. Jolly times were had.

Beyond the food, my FAVORITE part is always when we go around and say what we're thankful for. Ben makes sure we get in a circle and have a go at it, and having 17 people in our flat share what has happened over the past year, how 'cool of a group' we get to be for each other, the beauty of finding and building up this special community, etc..it really was all sorts of perfect. There were 5 different countries represented in our home that night. FIVE. How blessed are we? This made it super fun. We got to introduce 5 of them (including our very own Elias) to their very first Thanksgiving.

I joked with Ben, preparty, that if we burnt all the food then we'd just have a smaller group of people come next year. I said "probably only the people that really love us would come back."

The reality is, everyone that came would come back. Even if we ended up with a black turkey and too salty greenbean casserole. We're blessed with such kind, loving people like that.

Thankfully it all worked out perfectly. Thanks to Ben's magic timing and scheduling skills and God's gift of pinterest. We sent leftovers out the door and ended up with just enough to feed everyone and have leftovers for a few. 

So grateful for the community we have here, for sweet friends to play board games with us, watch our daughter and all her wild antics and share laughs with us.

Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.