Thanksgiving used to be my Aunt Edie's house with her lovely home cooking and those meatballs that I really really loved and sweet potatoes and marshmallows and gefilte fish inexplicably thrown in there somewhere.

Then when I was 14 or 15 that stopped.

We started going to Mexico and having Thanksgiving with our friends down there, my older brother (who later moved to Puerto Vallarta), and sometimes my dad and stepmom. We went to this one fancy restaurant down there, Le Bistro, that served REALLY CRAPPY Thanksgiving fare that they tried to gourmet up. It failed.

That kept on for about 3-4 years until my brother moved back down to Peru to be with my sister as she gave birth to my nephew. Since that kind of negated the idea of going down there for Turkey Day, we stopped.

My first year in college, Thanksgiving was at a fancy schmancy restaurant called Five Crowns, which is famous for their British style food (Think heavy on the meat and starch), because my stepbrother Mark had just gotten engaged and his fiancee's side of the family had come to the OC to meet his family and was allowed to pick the restaurant. (Oddly enough, my stepmother's family is mostly on the East Coast). The food was pretty good and it kind of felt like a nice, big family Thanksgiving. We repeated this the next year with just my mom, dad, stepmom, great aunt and I and it was rather nice.

Last year and this year, we've been going to a close family friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner and my dad has gone elsewhere. (My mom doesn't really like his family and avoids them at all costs. I don't blame her.)  I definitely feel at home, since they're almost like family to us too, but all this moving around doesn't make Thanksgiving seem like much of a Thanksgiving.

Oh well, just another holiday that furthers my general dissatisfaction with holidays, especially family oriented ones.