When Worlds Collide--An American Thanksgiving in London!!

Greetings everyone!! I meant to do this post last week but got a bit busy!! Nevertheless, it's still closer to Thanksgiving than Christmas, so that has to count for something!! :) Anyways, we were able to rent out a room and host a dinner for everyone in the church...plus some folks brought guests, so it turned into a bit of an outreach as well!

So here we are getting set up for the big dinner! We had around 30 people come so there was quite a bit of cooking and prep work!!

Here's my mom and Denae getting the pumpkin pies and cornbread ready...these are both pretty unusual things for the Brits to eat, so we were proud of them for being "adventurous!" Some of them actually had cornbread last year so they requested that we make it again!

My dad gave a brief Thanksgiving "devotional" before we got started with the meal.

So here we are beginning our feast!

Here's Justin, Tom, and Penny (whose name you might recognize from my newsletters!). I'm not sure if Justin was signalling for me not to take the picture or if he was just full from eating too much!

Here's another group photo...

...and here's me and Maxine and Denae after dinner.

Probably the highlight of our Thanksgiving dinner was a recording we made of "The 12 Days of Christmas" with everyone there! Denae and I recorded the music beforehand and then she put together groups of people to sing for the different "days." We thought it would be like pulling teeth to get everyone involved, but they all jumped in and had fun with it...and I have to say, it turned out pretty amazing! Plus it really seemed to bring everyone together, even those who came as guests!! :)

Justin, Carl, and Lee did some pretty crazy renditions of the "partridge in a pear tree."

The "12 drummers drumming" were sung by Analynn and her two boys (Jack and James--they were in a previous blog post). SO cute!! :)

Gwen, Penny, Lyn, Jackie, and Simone were our "nine ladies dancing."

Alistair and Dan did the "3 french hens."

Kevin and his friends were "4 calling birds" (and there were 4 of them singing, how about that!).

And of course, we had to have someone do "five golden rings," so Evan belted that one out! :)



So that's our Thanksgiving in London! We had a blast and the Lord really blessed our evening together! Even as I'm speaking of Thanksgiving, I have to say that I am SO thankful to be a part of such a sweet fellowship here in London...there's alot of love and unity in our body here, God has been very good to us!!