My Life as Told Through My Dishes - Thanksgiving Day

As Ellie and I set out the dishes that we needed for Thanksgiving, I realized that you could tell a bit of my history through the connections I have with my special dishes. The first one is my fine china. We got 7 place settings when we got married. I wish that I had bought an 8th one and that I had asked for the accessory pieces to go with it. Now the pattern is discontinued. I can only buy what I can find through a special dealer. Receiving these as gifts was a big thrill. They represented the future I was wishing for. We don't use them often, but I love when we do.

Next up is my pottery salad bowl. This is a special item I got when we went on a trip to Wisconsin. Ethan was just about two years old. I was lucky enough to be a stay-at-home mom at the time. We were always broke. We had sold our second car and were only paying cash for things in order to become debt free (if you did not count our house loan.) A friend of ours has a house on the lake in Madison County. He said that if we could get ourselves there that we could stay in his house for a week. When we arrived we found that he had left us each $100 to spend. I got this at "Pottery by Thor" in Egg Harbor. I love the bowl. It is a blend of beauty and function. I was fun to be able to buy such a luxurious thing without worrying about paying for it.

Next up is the turkey platter I painted for my mother. I painted it at a paint- your-own-pottery studio that my friend Natalie open and ran. I was very careful to put the kind of designs that my mother always points out in catalogs. I also used her favorite colors. It was a sort of grown up version of coloring a picture for my mommy. It made use both feel good.

The blue snowflake plates are linked, in a way, to the turkey platter. Only I was on the receiving end. Natalie and I used to love looking at the catalogs and the bisque. I always gravitated towards these shapes. One of the times she came for a long weekend she surprised me by bringing me these pieces of bisque. We made all kinds of things that weekend. It was also on the edge of the time when my kids were little enough to enjoy allowing my to put their hand prints on all kinds of things. Each time I get these out I think of that gesture Natalie made and how I felt like she really "saw me" and gave me something from her heart. The kids also have fun measuring up how their hands have grown.

The final one is the blue plate with Ellie's Cinnamon Orange Snow recipe. I bought the blue plates on the day when our remodeling was done and we could move back into the main floor of our house. We needed dishes badly. Most of the ones I loved were too expensive. The Gods of Good Deals for People Who Need Them smiled on me that day and I found boxes of four place settings for $5 a box. I bought several and now we are good even when some get broken. The oranges were a special recipe that Ellie created for the holidays. You quarter clementine oranges, set them on a bed of shaved ice and then sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar. They were quite good.