Happy Holidays, everyone!!! Thanksgiving is finally here which means two things: food and family. I hope everyone is home and enjoying their short break. As for me, I was not able to go home, but I got the next best thing. My brother and two closest friends came to Michigan and are staying in Holland with me! Although it’s pretty dead around here, we still managed to find some really fun things to do.
For starters, Melissa and Alex were the first to arrive, so I gave them a tour of campus since they have never been here before. Once we finished the tour, we just relaxed for a while since we were pretty wiped out from walking all over the place. Then we made a nice and simple spaghetti dinner and caught up for a while. It was so nice to just sit around and talk about home and things that I can’t talk about with my Midwestern friends. Next, we made our way down to PeachWave and enjoyed some frozen yogurt. Don’t you agree that eating frozen dessert is the best choice when it is literally freezing outside? Even though the yogurt just made us colder, it was well worth it. After that, we literally just sat around and watched six episodes of Modern Family until my brother arrived on the train. I’ve never seen that show but it is our mission to finish watching the first season. When Brian arrived we continued to watch and ate cookies. We were basically couch potatoes, but we deserved it after these stressful past few weeks!
On Thanksgiving Day, we started cooking everything around 10 AM and went for a nice walk in the snow while things were cooking. I’m slowly growing to enjoy the snow now that I’m around it more but I still am annoyed when the darn wind blows it in my face! Anyway, after our nice walk we watched more Modern Family and showed each other some fun YouTube videos and just enjoyed being inside after being in the cold for a while. When everything was done cooking, I was surprised how well everything turned out! I mean, I made a jello salad and cooked a pre-cooked turkey so that was pretty idiot-proof, but Melissa was the real cook! She made a complicated cranberry sauce and a sweet potato salad that was absolutely delicious. Of course, we took pictures of everything we made because we felt like adults by making our first Thanksgiving dinner ever without our parents around to tell us how to do everything. I’d say it was quite a success! We decided we should probably start digesting before moving on to dessert so we watched a Tina Fey movie called Admission. In addition, to pass the time we played some pretty intense rounds of CatchPhrase and then ate some ice cream. At this point it was about 1 AM so we decided to call it quits and get some sleep.
Today we all woke up and had some leftover turkey and basically had Thanksgiving round two! Instead of bumming around again, we played an epic game of Telephone Pictionary with another friend that came over. This game is literally one of my favorites because it turns out hilarious whenever you play it. Anyway, today we are planning on seeing Thor and then going out to dinner and maybe making cookies and hanging with other friends of mine that are around. Besides that, I’m not sure what is in store for us but it will be a blast regardless. It’s times like these that I really grow to appreciate the people in my life when things become stressful and I need an outlet. I am truly thankful and blessed to have such awesome people surrounding me when things are tough but also to be a reminder of home when none of us are able to take the long journey there. I hope everyone is having a great break and enjoying the rest of their time off!
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