I seriously can’t get my head around the fact that we’ve lived through a deadly pandemic for 7 month and me and my family members are still healthy and alive, so when (Canadian) thanksgiving came around this year, that’s the only thing that came to my mind and probably THE only thing that I am most thankful for this year.
Apart from juggling working from home, virtual schooling my child while maintaining a (somewhat) clean house with food on the table, my mental health has never been this low, so planning a thanksgiving dinner was the least of my concerns this year.
But I love celebrating life and I try not to miss an opportunity especially when it comes to special occasions like this. But such celebrations often comes at a cost which generally translates to lots of physical and mental labour in terms of cooking, preparing, planning, executing etc. but when life has become such a struggle with the explosive amount of workload, I couldn’t bear to take on added pressure of cooking a grandiose thanksgiving meal. Honestly I’ve never longed for weekends like I do now because this is the only time I get to catch a break and when it’s a long weekend, I wanted to spend the extra time with my family and not in the kitchen. I compromised for the sake of my sanity.
So I improvised.
– I thought about others ways to celebrate thanksgiving, dining in at a nice restaurant is always nice but not when we are at stage 2 of the pandemic.
– I also thought about catering a full dinner but since I didn’t plan ahead, that wasn’t an option either.
So I decided to do a meal with all store bought food and thanks to Metro for offering such wide selection of readymade, delicious meals. I wanted to keep the dinner simple as it was just for the 3 of us and I wanted to include mostly comfort meals just how a thanksgiving dinner should be.
I ordered the following items:
– A rotisserie chicken
– A hearty lasagna
– Classic mashed potatoes
– I got lunch meat, cheese and fruits and did a cheeseboard
– Chips and their assorted dips that comes with 4 different dips.
– A blueberry pie
– Metro special thanksgiving cake which really was the show stopper because Imaan was obsessed with it!
And I decorated the table with some apples and faux small pumpkins, some pine cones and acorns that Imaan collected on our walk that day and voila, I had a somewhat decent looking thanksgiving table!
Ordering grocery store food for thanksgiving might be THE most frowned upon thing but I never let the societal norms from doings things that I love and in this case, celebrating life, celebrating 7 months or being healthy and alive. I didn’t lift a finger nor lost any sleep to have a nice meal most importantly a nice time with my family and cost me only $60 and I call that a major win.
Now tell me, would you order an entire meal from a grocery store on a special occasion like this? Tell me in the comments why you would and if not why so?
