This year our Thanksgiving week included the annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, a wedding, a birthday and a weekend at home with the entire family. I want to share all of this with you and do some experimenting with my photographs.
How did you spend your Thanksgiving holiday this year?
This year’s Interfaith Thanksgiving Service was held at a brand new church in Escondido. Food and funds for the Interfaith Family Services were collected to feed and shelter the homeless. The choir included 110 singers from 7 area churches.
Morganne Delain (Nolan’s mom) wed Charlie Sloan in a beautiful Thanksgiving Day ceremony, followed by a feast!
Our daughter Rachel and her boyfriend Nolan provided music as their gift.
We decided to have our family Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday. Traditional turkey dinner with a Diestel turkey, grown here in California.
The entire family plus guests gathered on Saturday afternoon.
Our family loves to play card games when we all get together. The army blanket on the kitchen table is a tradition!
Our eldest daughter Marianne celebrated her birthday. She was born the first year we were married and we brought her home from the hospital on our first Thanksgiving together.
The delicious carrot cake recipe came from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. Here is her recipe for Carrot Ginger Layer Cake with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting. I doubled the recipe to make this giant cake! Rachel did the frosting and decorating.

November 28, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Great pics Mimi! Love the big table with whole family. Was that a ‘home grown’ turkey? Spent our Thanksgiving in Menifee with my little sisters family. It was a relaxing day for us.
November 29, 2011 at 8:11 am
Joanne, thanks for stopping by! No, we don’t raise turkeys…just avocados!
November 28, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Your cake looks delicious and I only wish I was there too, to hear your choir and my sweet niece’s voice! From the family table, it looks like you had “double the pleasure double the fun!”
November 29, 2011 at 8:12 am
Linda, we wish you could have been here too!
November 28, 2011 at 7:42 pm
Love the blog – nice to have more than just a caption to the pictures! Happy Thanksgiving + a couple!
November 29, 2011 at 8:12 am
Thanks for stopping by, Betsy!
November 29, 2011 at 8:04 am
Mimi,
Yes! Your long-awaited blog! I will put the address in my favorites list. Will you be alerting readers via Facebook when you add new postings? You have a beautiful family.
Lisa
November 29, 2011 at 8:14 am
Lisa, I will be sharing my blog posts via Facebook. You can subscribe to my blog and get updates via e-mail too. Look on the right side of any page and enter your e-mail address in the subscription box. Thanks for stopping by!
November 30, 2011 at 11:49 pm
It just warmed my heart to see the Holtz family together. I keep a picture of
the kids on my bookcase, taken a few years back, it was my birthday and you had an ice cream cake. We had so much fun playing cards and rummy-cube. Special memories.