Being multi-cultural I get to choose my holidays and the way I celebrate them. That means we have days off for Good Friday and Easter Monday and for Pentecost Monday. I join in with the Swiss on their national holiday August 1st. I celebrate Thanksgiving and we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve. The one day I don't celebrate is New Years Eve. It's my birthday and by the time the "eve" rolls around, I'm ready for bed. I guess that makes me a party pooper. Oh well.

Thanksgiving is the American holiday my husband has embraced, probably due to the food. I love it because of the food and being able to have a nice dinner with my family. It also means I get to spend the day in the kitchen cooking and being the boss. (I see my sister nodding at this... ) This year we had what we always have and a few new things. We broke with tradition this year and instead of making the cranberry salad my grandma used to always make, my sister brought spiced cranberry sauce. It was very good. Despite not liking Brussels sprouts, I made them for everyone else. My aunt had sent a recipe she really liked from La Grande Orange Café: Brussels sprout salad with mustard vinaigrette. I used pecans and Parmesan cheese instead of the almonds and Manchego cheese the recipe called for. At the last minute my mom decided we should have chicken instead of going all vegetarian like we always do. So I whipped up a batch of herbed butter, spread it around under it's skin, added some onions and shoved the bird in with the roasted yams and the stuffing. We also had our traditional warm green bean salad. Dessert was pumpkin pie and maple pecan pie.

I give thanks for:

• my family
• our health
• our jobs
• being able to live in a wonderful place
• being able to travel to wonderful places

Speaking of traveling to wonderful places, last weekend my husband and I decided to go somewhere we had never been before and to do something we will probably only do once, or twice if we're lucky. We went up to the Top of Europe, the Jungfraujoch. The weather was perfect and the view was good. None of the pictures I had seen before prepared me for the beauty I saw last Saturday. I was able to ignore all the other tourists there and concentrate on the mountains and snow. Here some impressions of an unforgettable day: