Tijerina Tidbits: Thanksgiving

Three years ago, I negotiated an agreement with Jacob for us to host Thanksgiving. Negotiating Thanksgiving back then was quite a challenge because I had to convince Jacob that it was woth it to him to host Thanksgiving even though it meant he would need to do most of the work. This was because I was in grad school and most of my time was spent studying or meeting with groups. Thanks to Dr. Plowman's negotiations class, I was able to negotiate and draft a contact that both of us agreed on (plus I was able to use my Thanksgiving negotiation as my final project, on which I earned an A).

Based on the success of that initial Thanksgiving at our house, Jacob has easily agreed to host Thanksgiving ever since. Thus, for the 3rd year in a row, we hosted Thanksgiving. Each year seems to run a little smoother than the previous year and we received a lot of positive feedback from our families suggesting that this year was the best year yet! I was especially glad about this because now that our families are growing (i.e., through marriages) we know that we might not be able to host Thanksgiving the same way, much longer. For instance, now that my cousin Cesar is married, his family now spends Thanksgiving game night with him, so you can see that we are slowly losing our attendees.

The details:
Our families arrived around at our house between 2-2:30 pm; we ate dinner a little after 3 pm (we had good variety of food, plus we had 3 sweetpotato dishes and 2 cranberry dishes); the football lovers watched football (which gave me some time to clean up a little), and the non-football lovers engaged in conversations with each other and helped me pick up the kitchen by packing up to-go plates for Jacob's grandfather (who wasn't able to make it to our house); we enjoyed delicious desserts, cocoa and coffee (my favorite part); and we played Turbo Cranium (my mom was a great puppeteer, Monica was a great puppet, and Jacob's dad was a great sensosketcher). After the game, we sat back and relaxed in the living room to wind down from the day. It was a great Thanksgiving!