Thanksgiving Chronicle
Hello and Happy Thanksgiving from the House of Studies in DC! We wanted to share some of the goings on here with all of you, so I documented the excitement of preparing and enjoying Thanksgiving.
Our adventure begins with a crowded kitchen, after a morning of reading books in front of the fire.
We agreed that the Americans should prepare the food. We divided up the REAL Thanksgiving dishes we selected for maximum Thanksgiving experience roughly by the given cook's enthusiasm for the dish:
Pumpkin Pie - Keefe
Green Beans - Connor
Sweet Potato Casserole - Aaron
Stuffing - Ben
Turkey – me
Ok, to be honest, I got the turkey because I cooked and carved a 22 pounder for the American University Catholic students the week before, Keefe got the pumpkin pie because he's the undefeated pumpkin pie guy in his house for over a decade of competitions, Ben and Aaron got their dishes due to simple enthusiasm, and we just told Connor to do the green beans.
Needless to say, the aftermath of preparing a 10 person Thanksgiving dinner in 1 hour is...catastrophic.
We also got some football in! I failed to act fast enough to get a picture with everyone, since it's been in the mid to low 20s, so the move to shower was pretty fast. Ben's team won, but I think we could have come back if we kept going; Andres, who was among those to move fast on the showers, picked up the game really fast and scored 2 touchdowns in his first game.
Then we had a thanksgiving prayer and Adoration, spent a few minutes heating everything back up, and got to down to eating.
Finally, everyone came together to clean up the kitchen after watching the Falcons v. Saints game, which turned out to be much more action-packed than we could have hoped.
Overall, a great Thanksgiving! On Monday we return to classes, but in the mean time we're spending time catching up on housework and spending time in community and prayer. Before that, on Friday, we have the first post-encuentro for San Juan Diego, since we've had the retreats for men and women earlier in November with great success, and though everything's quiet on the American University front for this Thanksgiving weekend, we've got 2 students in RCIA, 3 weekday Masses, well attended talks, and lots of plans for next term. At St. Anne's, the parish church just on the end of our block, we're starting a Sunday night Mass for Advent on December 2nd. God has been blessing us here in extraordinary ways, showing us His love and support in each area we serve Him, and so we thank you for your prayers and support as well in doing His work.
In Christ,
Andrew Gass, St. John Society
House of Studies, Washington, D.C.