A Star Wars Thanksgiving!

I really loved our Thanksgiving this year.  I love Thanksgiving.  It's definitely my favorite holiday.  I love how the origin of Thanksgiving is about two different cultures coming together, learning to trust one another and sharing a beautiful meal.  It's about friendship.  I enjoy the cooking part of Thanksgiving too.  It's one of my favorite meals to cook and share.

This year, we decided to host our own Thanksgiving and share it with our good friends (who are Australian).  We also decided to make it a Star Wars Thanksgiving.  I mentioned in earlier posts that we introduced the kids to Star Wars this year.  They love it, of course.  We all wanted to dress up in Star Wars for Halloween.  I ordered the costumes, but the took SOOO long to arrive!  The costumes were not here in time for Halloween.  So, A Star Wars Thanksgiving it is!!

On the large mirrors near our dining table, I drew a large tree out of chalk (liquid chalk).  Throughout the week, we all wrote things we are thankful for on cut out leaves and taped them up on the tree.

Madeline's leaf says "I am happy that everyone is safe".  

Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Singapore.  The kids had school and Scott had work.  After school, our friends came over.  We took the kids swimming and we all played until the dads came from work.

After swimming, we dressed in our Star Wars costumes.  All of the children wrote a Thankful on a leaf.

It was nearly time to eat!

I made turkey, stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce and rolls.

Wyatt had mostly cranberry sauce and bread rolls for dinner.

We watched a little bit of Episode 5.

After dinner we headed outside to have a battle with the light sabers and to eat dessert!

For dessert, I made individual apple pies (baked in the apple).  They were delicious, but we were all so full by the time we ate them!

Our Thanksgiving this year was definitely non-traditional, but I loved it!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

UN Day and Halloween

Recently, the girls celebrated UN day at school.  I think this is something the school does really well.  Children in prep (kinder) through year 2 are invited to choose a UN member country and come dressed as that country on UN Day.  The children also must create a passport for themselves including facts and information about their chosen country.  The children may not choose their own home country.  This year, Lily chose Mexico and Madeline chose India.  It was a fun day!

On the day after UN Day, we celebrated Halloween in our condo.  We decorated our door, carved a pumpkin and got ready to have some trick or treats!  I'm really grateful that our condo celebrates Halloween in this way.  The children have a ball and I don't feel like they are missing out on this very American tradition.  The scale of the Halloween party here is no where near what happens in the states, but it's enough for the kids to feel like they get to celebrate the holiday.

This year, I visited each of the kids classrooms and carved a pumpkin with them.  I really love carving pumpkins.  It's my favorite part of Halloween.  It was really fun to share it with the children in all of the classes.  Many of them have never carved a pumpkin before.  I let the kids help scoop out the seeds and they got to choose the design for the pumpkin faces.  We had fun!

We had a bit of a costume disaster this Halloween.  It all ended well, but not as planned.  This year, we introduced the children to Star Wars.  It is an understatement to say that we are Star Wars fans.  We're fanatics.  Star Wars has taken over our family.  The kids all wanted to be a character from Star Wars this year for Halloween and Scott and I decided to join in too.  Family fun!  I found the costumes online (Wyatt- Darth Maul, Madeline - Princess Leia, Lily - Ahsoka, Me- Queen Amidala, Scott- Qui Gon Jin), complete with the necessary light sabers and wigs!  I ordered them at the beginning of October.  They have STILL not arrived.  My kids were sad, but they handled it better than I expected.  I have promised a family Star Wars party when the costumes do arrive.  We are just that nutty.

So, we had to get a little creative.  I got out our dress up box on the day we were trick or treating and the kids and I did our best to come up with something that made them happy.

Lily is an angel, Madeline is Princess Zelda and Wyatt is a skeleton pirate firefighter.  

We met our condo friends down stairs in our common area.

We trick or treated for about an hour with this cute bunch and then we had a night party downstairs.  The kids had a ball!  

On the actual day of Halloween, our good friend had a Halloween party at her place.  The kids and I decided not to use the costumes from a few nights ago, rather just Halloween themed clothes and some fun face makeup.  Easy.  We had a ball.  My kids are experts at bobbing for apples!

Happy Halloween!