We had eight family members gathered in Missouri for the Thanksgiving feast. It was a wonderful time, and my nephew and his wife went above and beyond to make it memorable.  It was my husband who made the memory we won’t forget.

Dale played golf in freezing weather with a high wind and moisture in the air.  Now, my nephew played in the same weather, but he is much younger. My husband knows better than to play in weather like that – well not really since he will play in the snow if he has a colorful ball.

My husband came down with a cold. And when he gets a cold, I want to ship him off somewhere far away.  He coughs and coughs and coughs and blows his nose and makes sounds I don’t like to hear. A cold always goes to his chest, and he can choke on air, so imagine all that congestion trying to find its way out. To put it bluntly, I hate it when he gets a cold.

As families will do when they get together, we played a lot of games, mostly with cards.  We played poker, ninety-nine and dominoes.  All of those games require us to touch stuff everyone else has touched; I think you get the picture here.  We are all sick. If you did not get sick playing games, you got sick riding in the car where we were spreading germs like in an airplane.

I generally put my Christmas decorations up the weekend of Thanksgiving, but since we were going to be out of town, I put them up early.  Thank goodness! It will be several days before I feel in the festive mood.

So, I am in my chair in the living room, in my sweats, wrapped in a blanket by the fire drinking a hot toddy, watching TV and admiring my Christmas tree.

It could be worse, I could not have a tree up to admire, and then I would be stressing about that.

The other problem with the holiday was, we were missing Tricia and Devin.  I am one of those who thinks all families should live close to one another. But, alas, that is not the way of the world anymore.