Thanksgiving Up North

14 Dec

For several years we’ve been fortunate enough to spend Thanksgiving with Dave’s Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim. An added bonus is that Uncle Jim’s neice and her family also spend Thanksgiving there and our boys love having their kids to play with. Our first trip up as a family was when Solomon was 2 months old. We’ve made it several years since and we were anxiously waiting to see everyone again after spending last Thanksgiving in the balmy tropics known as Alabama.

Mary & Jim have a cabin several hours north and have added a bunk house and are now working on a stellar hangar and workshed that I neglected to grab a photo of. It’s a mighty fine piece of woodwork!

The main house is a circular cabin and is heated by a wood stove downstairs which keeps the whole house toasty and warm — a huge bonus because many Thanksgivings it is barely above zero degrees outside. This year, however, we had a heat wave. The kids were able to sled and sled and sled some more due to a warm wind which brought us up to about 25 degrees. Woo-hoo!

Did I mention the food? Mary makes just about everything from scratch and there were some divine bread rolls that I am still drooling over (butter makes the world go round, right!) On our last night there we always get to experience the massive undertaking of making lefse, a kind of nordic bread that I know nothing about. It requires a full team effort, though, and these guys have obviously been doing it for years and have all the kinks worked out. The kids even helped rolling and carrying and flipping this year. It was a blast.

Can’t wait to see what happens next year!

To see the slideshow go here: A Far North Thanksgiving