Thanksgiving Dinner(s)

We are lucky enough to have a lot of family close by and so we tend to get two thanksgivings every year.
This year was no exception.

Thursday we enjoyed a good meal, a few games, some technical impossibilities, and a movie. Then Friday we enjoyed another good meal, a few laughs, an impossibly technical christmas tree, and excellent eggnog pumpkin pie. That is bordering on a run-on sentence so let me break it down a little bit.

This 3 hour time-lapse helps tell the story – the meal and the games. The Mermaids helped me with the…er…soundtrack.

Thanksgiving 2010 (6.4MB M4V (Quicktime) download)

What this doesn’t capture is the conversation, which really set the tone.
After arriving I noticed that a behemoth bowl of fruit salad dominated the table. I dared enter the domain of the kitchen for a quick question of Monya,

Do you really want this huge thing on the table?
Well…
I mean we could just, maybe put it in a smaller bo…
Yeah, if you want to download it just go ahead.
…

It was Aunt Schmubba that broke the news on that technical impossibility

Ahhhhh….did you just suggest that he…uhh…’download’ the fruit salad?!
Well yeah I…

Then we all realized Monya has become, much to her chagrin, very ‘tech’- she is apparently reserving bandwidth for meals.
Soon afterward I loaded some turkey and mashed potatoes onto the hard disk, prepared them for a torrent of peer-to-peer communication and I even uploaded some coffee and pie. Who knew there was an app for that?

Friday’s meal was amazing as well. LaGrande Mermaid played with the resident pooch, Maggie-May who could squeak a chew toy off the top shelf with her high-pitched bark.
At some point during the evening I started quizzing Gramma Nana on the things in her kitchen, and much to my surprise, without looking she knew exactly what was where down to what was the only spice in her spice cabinet with a yellow lid. Amazing.
One thing led to another and I thought to quiz her on her tree. She claimed no ability to have memorized ornamental placement but I was surprised to discover that she didn’t know how many ornaments she had?
So I embarked to find out.

Calculating the tree to be 9 feet tall, with a radius at the base of 2.5(r) feet we measured the length of a side at roughly 9.34 feet (s).
The area of the surface is = πrs (we don’t care about the base) and therefore the surface area is 3.1415*2.5*9.34 = 73.4 square feet.
We then assumed that she installed ornaments an average of 8 inches deep (3/4 of a foot) and so to figure the volume of the hangable ornament space we multiplied 73.4 * .75 to get 55.1 cubic feet.
Then Brady and I counted the number of ornaments in 1 cubic foot of space (so marked using Grampa Troy’s foot long slippers) and averaged our two counts at 21.5.

Having all the data we now needed to estimate the total number of ornaments on the tree we simply multiplied 21.5 * 55.1 to get a whopping 1,200* ornaments.

(* so the math actually comes to 1184 but I am rounding up…trust me, if you saw this tree you’d round up too.)
TheMommy thinks Gramma Nana went light on it this year.

For those that wonder – Gramma Nana claims that it takes her 10 hours, each year, to put the ornaments on the tree AFTER she gets the lights put on – and tested.

It is a labor of love, to be sure.