An intro to our 2008 season of the Turkey: Being Thankful

It's that time of year again, when we go out into the streets in our autumn regalia, raid the grocery stores and invite family members we only vaguely remember we had into our homes.  

Our family skipped out on most of the Thanksgiving festivities this year.  It's not because we have anything against Thanksgiving or being thankful in general.  In fact my family loves Thanksgiving.  We look forward to this holiday every year, an entire day that is devoted to family, being thankful and the opportunity to eat copious amounts of food to prove a point!  No, we missed some of the on-the-day Thanksgiving activities because we were doing a 2 1/2-minute spot on ABC for the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade.  That's right, I'm talking the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Macy's move aside because ShaeLaurel is going to rock your socks.  Sure the Philly Parade may not have as many floats or attractions, but they have us!  If you don't believe me, check out the video of our performance on youtube:

The Parade was awesome and we met so many amazing people!  I had the opportunity to show exactly how little I know about modern pop culture by asking Mario (the solo R&B artist, actor and recently the dancer on 'Dancing With the Stars') what group he was backing up.  Ouch!

We also got to meet the descendants of the Von Trapp family.  They are so close to our carbon copies that it was almost scary.  We shared stories and talked for as long as time would allow.  We are all roughly the same age, we have all been performing for the same amount of time (7 years) and are all homeschooled.  We also both did tours in Europe and Asia.  How strange is that?

We celebrated a little in Philly with our good friends/family from Boston, then drove down south into the warmer weather where my Aunt and Uncle had postponed their own Thanksgiving celebrations to wait for us.

There was turkey and stuffing, and mashed potatoes and gravy, and even this really cool pear dish whose name escapes me.  It was a blast.  I even learned how to cook a turkey....

Surprisingly, as the only vegetarian in our family, I have very few problems with the Thanksgiving holiday.  Besides the fact that this is another in a long line of holidays centered around a fictitious event whose primary purpose is to slaughter an animal that was almost our National Emblem, I'm down with the whole turkey thing.  (Although I'm more of a mashed potato person myself.)

Back to Thanksgiving, we played Bananagrams (see The Games We Play) until our eyes hurt and the levels of our amazing word creations made our heads explode.  We even had time to do some family projects....More about that later :)