Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I’ve always thought it the best of all possible worlds — you get the holiday feeling, the togetherness, the great food, all wrapped up in a distinct lack of commercialism. In short, pumpkin pie without all the present stress.

Though today is the actual day, I’ll have to wait until Saturday for my piece of the pie since today is not a day off for the Swedes in my life, if you can believe it. The party we’re planning is well worth waiting for, however, and I don’t mind having a couple of extra days to get all my cooking and organizing done. At a minimum, I’ll be making three pumpkin pies, two pumpkin rolls (recipe forthcoming for those who requested it), two cardamom cakes, a pan or two of stuffing, and more praline-topped sweet potatoes than you can shake a stick at. When I’ll find the time to do all that I can’t say, since we’ve got out-of-town company arriving in little more than an hour. I expect there will be a bit of the midnight oil burnt ’round these parts before dinnertime on Saturday.

As I type this, my super-duper fantabulous friend Leslie and her super-duper fantabulous son, Alex, are winging their way northward from Stockholm and will stay with us until Monday afternoon. We’ve been planning their trip since September, and for so long it seemed so far away that I can hardly believe the day has finally arrived. She hasn’t been up here since just after Tage was born more than three years ago, so it will be fun to show off the improvements we’ve made to the house and our menagerie of pets. And the new baby, of course.

Every year I think that I will write a long, thoughtful Thanksgiving post about all the many things I have to be thankful for and the ways in which I appreciate them, but I always come up short when I try to find the actual words. Suffice it to say that I have more to be thankful for than I could have dreamed of just a few short years ago. Amd I am as mindful as I can be of my unbelievable good fortune. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: truly, my cup runneth over.