We've Come A Long Way...

Last night, I refused to let any member of our family leave the dinner table until we had set the Thanksgiving 2023 pie selections. And we literally sat there until the sun went down while we argued the pros and cons of different flavors. You think it would be pretty easy, right? But the list depends on so many things like food cost, efficiency, popularity, and storage space. That 12th flavor was literally a battle of the wills for each of us. (Hayden and I will always pick 12 flavors over 11, Ellery and Jason will always pick efficiency over other factors, and Jeanne tried to make a compelling case for the addition of Old Fashion Raisin pie to the list. No worries…she was voted off the island easily.)

I realized today that this is actually our 10th Thanksgiving. Our original plan was to be open by Thanksgiving 2013 because we launched a Kickstarter in October 2013 and we were dumb enough to believe we “just needed a few weeks for construction” to open. Goodness. The naivete slays me. (It would actually be April 2014 before we opened, so obviously that took a minute longer than we originally planned.)

Not to be deterred in 2013, we took ourselves out to the Elks Lodge on Highway WW and baked there. We only had 150 pies or so on order, but it felt like 1,000,000. Also, we advertised that year in the NEWSPAPER. And people read it and ordered! (I don’t think there’s much left to the local newspaper any longer and that makes me sad because I personally always enjoyed the evening paper and now it’s just a thing of the past.)

We offered four flavors - Pumpkin, French Silk, Southern Pecan, and Chocolate Bourbon Pecan. And we offered those in the 12 inch size only and were only equipped for cash transactions. And it’s not the naivete that gets me there, but the boldness with which we both approached that first year. (Please note, we took all that moxie into Thanksgiving 2014 at PJP Buttonwood and it was AN EPIC DISASTER. If you want the horrid details, you can find them in the blog archives. Or you can take my word that it was a traumatic. Each year, I read those 2014 posts to refresh my recollection of just how wrong it can go and then I use that as my starting point for our baking plan.)

In looking at all that, I realized the blog turns 10 on Monday, September 25th. And short of marriage, parenthood, and a few friendships, I’m not sure I’ve ever stuck with anything for 10 years or longer. That Thanksgiving ordering post was the 39th post of 2013, so you can tell the blog was a prolific start to me having a lot of things to say. And while I guess our approach to Thanksgiving has changed tremendously in 10 years, my wordiness certainly has not.

Documenting your life on the Internet has pros and cons, of course. But top among the pros is the ability to look back and see where you’ve become a better version of yourself. And considering we hand chopped all those pecans that first year, we’ve definitely come a long way. Plus, I didn’t even know how to make raisin pie in 2013…