How the Digital Age Helped Fascilitate My Thanksgiving.

My husband and I are in our first year of being married. Even though we live only one city away from both sets of parents, we decided to do holidays on our own this year. We want to establish ourselves as a separate, new family with our own traditions, and we felt that one way to do this was to spend the holidays away from our families. I think both my Mom and my mother-in-law were slightly disappointed, but they were both really good sports about it.

Last week was our first big holiday alone together: Thanksgiving. The week before last we made a list of things that we had to have or it wouldn't be Thanksgiving, and pretty much left it at that. I'm not the greatest at planning ahead for meals, and my husband and I both had big assignments and projects due right before the break, so we didn't think about shopping or gathering recipes until about Tuesday night. By then it was crunch time, as we wanted to brine the turkey for at least 12 hours before cooking it. In a panic, we called our mothers and asked them to email us recipes and methods. 

Now, we could have simply done a Google or Pinterest search for what we needed, but we wanted to have the specific recipes that we loved, so we started with asking the experts. Then, when we were unclear on what to do beyond our mothers' instructions, we turned to the internet. We did end up doing several Google searches to supplement the turkey advice that we got, as well as finding a sweet potato recipe.

On the day of, we both called our moms several times for tips and tricks and then again to report on the overall success of the endeavor (in case you're wondering, my stuffing came out slightly soggy and we didn't have any rolls because the turkey cooked an hour faster than anticipated, but otherwise we succeeded fully! )

I realize that emails, Google, and cellphones are no longer considered to be revolutionary technology and the ways that they helped us were relatively minor, but I am still grateful for them. If our first Thanksgiving had been as late as 15 years ago, all we would have been able to do short notice would be to call our moms on a land-line, making it much harder to have the Thanksgiving that we wanted.

I'm looking forward to the way that the Digital Age will bring my family together on Christmas: a Skype call from my missionary brother.