That's how it is with my family. We're Filipino so we tend to go crazy. There's usually a very large table somewhere loaded with tons of food from potluck contributors. Sometimes a whole roasted pig would be sitting at another table with some family member standing over it hacking it to pieces with a large cleaver. People are free to come around and load up their plates with whatever they want whenever they want. You want to eat sweets now? OK! You want to eat nothing but meat? OK! And most people leave the party with a to-go box (or 2 or 3 and so on...) loaded with more food to take home. And then we happily contemplate on how much weight we probably gained.

It was a shocker to my fiancé on his first thanksgiving with us. He's a midwestern white boy. Especially when I told him that I don't know half the people there and I'm prob related to only 20% of them. AND it was a shocker to me when we spent Christmas at his family's and they have a reasonable amount of food per person on the table. I remember thinking, "Is this it? Is there more food coming? Where are all the people? There's only 7 of us here and I'm counting the cats."