Photo Credit: The Miss Information
I’m not one for shopping in crowds, so online shopping changed my life. I still tend to avoid Black Friday, but this year I thought if I wasn’t looking for things for myself I could get a head start on holiday shopping. ‘Tis the season!
I used to mark my year in reasons to fly home, and one of the biggest trips was naturally for Thanksgiving. LAX is reportedly the busiest airport in the US during Thanksgiving week, and from the endless delays, cancelations, and hours spent at a terminal during that week for the past decade I can say proudly that it’s true.. and I survived. Last year in the cab ride to the airport, a thought casually crossed my mind: “This is the last year I’ll travel for Thanksgiving.” It came and went before I had a chance to challenge it, but a year later I smile at my personal premonition.
For the first time since 2005, I am staying put for Thanksgiving. I see my family every day, yet the festive air is contagious and the holiday spirit feels even more magical now that I’m in a city in which temperatures drop for the season (plus you have to admit San Francisco feels like a snow globe city, without the snow). 2014 has been quite a year. I don’t know many who didn’t go through some kind of major change—a decision to change jobs, move into a new apartment, relocate to a new city, go back to school, start a company—and we are all better for it.
This Thanksgiving, take a pause before you begin your meal or before you change into your Thanksgiving pants, and give thanks to those around you (literally and figuratively). Here are what our single girls are grateful for this year.
While we dined our way through some amazing meals we had the pleasure of picking Andrea’s brain about the wines which were chosen to go with each dish. With her signature down-to-earth nature, she brought her expertise to us in a way which we could actually understand.
With Thanksgiving just a few days away, our time with Andrea couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. This year we’ve decided to open the doors to our new house and host a big Friendsgiving feast. We’ll be prepping the turkey and have asked each of our guest to bring along their favorite sides dishes. With an invite list of nearly 50, our meal is certain to have a lot of variety.
If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, you know that figuring out what drinks to serve to match your exhaustive menu can be quite the challenge. Luckily, Andrea’s expertise has prepped me with some easy to follow tips for pulling together the perfect wine pairings. If you’re looking for a simple guide to get your wine right, these points should suit you perfectly.
I get overwhelmed around Thanksgiving. Between the magazines, blogs, and cooking websites it’s hard to navigate through all of the recipes, advice, and ideas. While I get excited to try new recipes and make a huge meal, I try to restrain myself and stick to the basics. As much as I love cooking, relaxing and spending time with friends and family is way more fun. After a few years of stressing myself out, I’ve developed a list of traditional, foolproof recipes that I go back to every year.
I spend Thanksgiving with my mom and we go to dinner at my neighbor Chris’s house. We start the meal by scratching off lottery tickets and then dig into Thanksgiving staples, complemented with kielbasa and sauerkraut as a nod to my neighbor’s Polish heritage. We usually add a few new dishes that may or may not make the cut and reappear the next year. Here’s what’s going to be on my Thanksgiving table this year:
It’s only natural that we start by talking about turkey.
Happy Thanksgiving! When we set out on this journey, we were focused on finding a creative outlet for ourselves. We knew we had a great idea to share our experiences as twenty-somethings with others and to call on our girlfriends to share their life lessons with us. The Single Diaries hit its three-month mark last Sunday, and we are overwhelmed with the response we’ve received from our extended circles in this short amount of time. When you’re focused on writing and getting posts up on time, it’s easy to block your view of where the website stands in the public sphere. Because of this, your words of encouragement, support and affirmation mean the world to us. We are grateful that you are reading. We are grateful that you find value in our words. We are grateful that you want to share in our vision. We are grateful to have you wonderful people as friends.
We wanted to celebrate our work, your work, and our friends, so we hosted our first Single Diaries Friendsgiving at Jen’s new place.