Well, I hope everyone else had an excellent Thanksgiving. Mine was great. It's been a tradition in my Mom's side of the family for the past 10 years or so for all the relatives living in or around the Midwest to get together for Thanksgiving at someone's house. Usually my parents are the host every other year. Even though it's not really super exciting, it's one of my favorite times of the year, especially as I've grown out of sullen teenager hood. Like I said, it's not really exciting, but I enjoy just sitting around with my book, watching the kids, and enjoying the conversations that pop up. There are 19 people this year. Dinner was really good yesterday, especially since we brought the smoker down and smoked two of the turkeys. That was a big hit with most of the adults.

Christian also seems to really enjoy being around a big family that's only a little crazy. This time he brought down his wireless router and my uncle Paul brought four laptops and all the kids (and some of the adults) have been sitting around playing Age of Empires (or something like that) all week. He's been pretty popular for that.

The only problem that we do have with all this is the whole Mormon thing. This is actually mostly me and Christian's problem, my relatives are great and probably mostly blissfully unaware of what we're feeling. (Of course some of them probably have opinions on the whole thing, but they mainly keep them to themselves.) Christian knows very little about Mormon culture, and is confused by half of my relatives' conversations. When he asks me about it, I start getting unreasonably annoyed about explaining things that are hard to explain to people who aren't experienced with them. Invariably the explanations sound stupid, he doesn't understand, and I start getting defensive. He doesn't ask as many questions as he used to, poor guy. This time, though, he was having a really hard time with the fact that my mom told him that it would probably not be a good idea to use red wine in the steaming pan for the smoked turkey. He understands the whole not drinking thing to a point, especially since he doesn't drink. But he thinks it's stupid to not use alcohol for cooking when all the alcohol burns off before the food is eaten. How do you explain something like that?

Of course I would probably be having trouble with this no matter what my marital situation. It's really hard for me to reject the Mormon religion so completely and yet accept and enjoy my family heritage and traditions. My family heritage and traditions on both sides of the family are all wrapped up in Mormonism. I've never really had a chance to talk about this to anybody, either. I was on an ex-Mormon list for a while, but most of the discussion there in regards to family was about how to handle your family cutting you off or preaching to you or telling you that you've fallen away. My family has never done that (although who knows what some of them are thinking,) but it's still a strange situation to deal with. The people that I know at church, even those who know something about Mormonism, don't really understand what it's like either.

Even so, I'm thankful to have such a great family and a chance to spend time with on Thanksgiving, and that's what really counts.