Only two more days until NaNoWriMo is over and I can go back to my normal life! I’m within 4,000 words of my 50,000 word goal, and I can’t tell you how relieved I will be when I finally cross the finish line.

Despite my failure to chronicle it, we’ve been pretty busy around here lately. I spent most of Friday in the kitchen, doing my part of the preparations for our Thanksgiving feast, which we held on Saturday. The four of us American girls who hang around together (me, Helena, Debbie, and Melanie) decided several weeks ago that it would be fun to have a party with all of us, our guys, and our guys’ parents, so that’s what we did, and it turned out really, really well. We rented the local församlingsgården and Lydia prettied up the place with Thanksgiving decorations, some sent from the States by my mom, and some that she made herself.

I don’t know if it’s that norrlänningar are different or if we all just managed to marry into the right families, but our party was nothing like you might expect if you believe the stereotypes that Swedes are cold and unfriendly. Despite knowing only their own sons and daughters-in-law, all of the parents got into the party spirit, making the rounds introducing themselves, and talking and laughing with everybody else. There was a marked lack of awkward silences and everyone interacted with everyone else, rather than staying within their comfortable family units. They ate everything and liked it (or said they did, anyway — I was asked by at least two of the mothers for my pie recipes), and it was an all-around successful event, if I do say so myself.

We are a very lucky group up here, we four girls. Between us we have a sort of friendly rivalry about who has the best mother-in-law, each one of us steadfastly maintaining that her own is the best. I remarked to Melanie at one point during the evening that it was pretty unusual for all of us to have such good relationships with our mothers-in-law, and we agreed that we are extremely fortunate.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Lydia sitting, unimpressed, beside the can-shaped cranberry sauce. She may not have understood the significance, but the rest of us Americans knew that that was the true symbol of Thanksgiving.