It's starting to look a lot like Christmas

This movie marks the start of the Christmas season for me. Ever since Elf came out over Thanksgiving in 2004, in has been a tradition to watch it. After all the food is eaten up, the dishes are washed and we're settled in, we put Elf on and just have a good time hanging out together and laughing. Out of all our Thanksgiving traditions with my family, I think watching Elf is probably my favorite. There is just something about just getting to relax and laugh together that makes you really thankful for what you have. Having something consistent, even when it's just a silly movie like Elf, is really awesome, especially when there isn't a lot of consistency is this crazy life. But yeah, watching this movie definitely gets me into the Christmas spirit. It's just like, Thanksgiving cannot be complete and Christmas can't start without watching Elf.

Thanksgiving was great this year. We packed up our bags, locked up the house, and jumped in the car for the extremely long, excruciating, and tiring 5 minute drive to my grandma and grandpa's house on Wednesday night. I'm kidding, of course. The drive wasn't that excruciating. ;) We usually go somewhere on Thanksgiving, most of the time to my Aunt Shana and Uncle Eric's house, which is always a long drive, but we weren't able to do that this year. So, we decided to pretend like we were going on a trip and slept over at my grandparent's house the night before Thanksgiving. Now, there is something you need to understand, and that is that my grandma is probably the most awesome cook/baker in the entire world. Seriously, I think I would die without her food sometimes. I cry inside for the people that do not get to experience real southern cooking like she makes it. Mm-mm- good! You need to understand one other thing. I cannot cook. At all. I'm pretty sure that gene got lost somewhere along the way, hitting Sarah, skipping me, then hitting Sydni. These things happen sometimes. I want to start getting cooking lessons from my grandma, I need them.

All this mess about cooking is leading up to something, I promise. Basically, the Sweet Potato Souffle Disaster. Well, not complete disaster, or really a disaster, but you will see what I mean. I wanted to make this really tasty dish this year that my Aunt Shana had made two Thanksgiving ago. Sweet Potato Souffle consists of yams and a bunch of other stuff, then a topping of walnuts (or maybe pecans. I can't remember), corn flakes, and brown sugar. It is really good, really sweet, and relatively easy to make. Easy for people that are competent at cooking, that is. So we get everything ready, mix stuff up and start putting things into the mixer. Now the recipe doesn't say drain the yams, so even though they look like they might need a little draining I decided to just dump them in the mixer along with the butter and everything else. Yeah... draining might have been a good idea. A great idea, actually, because this is what it ended up looking like:

This isn't the best picture, but... I think you get the picture. Yes, those chunks are butter. Yes, it looked pretty disgusting and pretty inedible. We figured out we were supposed to drain the yams after mixing it all and ending up with what looked like vomit. Thank God for Grandmas! I would have just chucked it and added Sweet Potato Souffle the the long, long list of things that I cannot cook, but Gram came up with a plan! We got the strainer out and strained some of the excess water out the best that we could, and mixed it up again. Eventually it got pretty smooth and we stuck it in the toaster oven to bake. Yes, I said toaster oven. They actually work really well, especially when you have a 18 pound turkey in the real oven! When it was all over we had a pretty good Sweet Potato Souffle, and you would have never been able to tell it looked like orange throw-up an hour before!! Thank you Jesus for Thanksgiving memories!