The feast

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Pacific Ocean. Frobisher's Thanksgiving was not for harvest but homecoming. He had safely returned from a search for the Northwest Passage, avoiding the later fate of Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony to give thanks for surviving the long journey. The feast was one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations by Europeans in North America. (Wikipedia)

There is something about being allowed to have a large belly during pregnancy that I found comforting.  I have been a fat person in a skinny body, but I have never been a real skinny person.  It seems that everything on the lips ends up on the hips and requires some serious Weight Watchers to be removed again.   It is funny how you meet different people at different stages of your life.  Some think that I was once big, got skinny, and now back to big. (They're right.)  Others think I was naturally thin, but pregnancy did this to me.  (They have been fooled.) Regardless, if I am going to be hanging out on the beach in Hawaii, some serious work needs to be done.
I was fortunate to have a group of friends who all had babies around the time that I had Jack.  Except for a few friends (and I did consider removing them from my friend pool) most of them took some time getting back into their pre-pregnancy jeans.  I watched while they did this, but made little effort myself.  I even considered staying this size.  I had an excuse now, didn't I?  But I did reach a point when it was time to return to WW in hopes of wearing the many clothes still hanging in the very back of my closet.
All was going really well when the feast crept up. The leader at WW spent the entire meeting discussing the number of points belonging to each traditional Thanksgiving food and how to avoid the "bad ones" such as pumpkin pie and stuffing.  The whole meeting there was this insane laughter in my brain as I knew that I was going to be eating a lot of pumpkin pie, stuffing, and well, probably enough other things to make my belly actually hurt from the strain.  My thoughts on the this were entirely different than hers (although I appreciated her effort).  If I want to be a reasonably thin person long term, I am still going to have to be allowed to eat the feast.  My family has many traditions and most of them revolve around food.  We even plan our vacations around food. 
I will diet until I reach a happy weight for me and then I will attempt to maintain that weight when I get there....but I will not give up the good stuff in life to be thin.  Life's too short.