Welcome to the Stretch Run

The Friday Newsletter enters the final phase of the year.

So, how’d yesterday go?

I adore Thanksgiving. I spent the entire day either on my feet cooking or flat on the couch recovering; we prepared a lovely feast and shared it with family who we couldn't see last year. I ate three days’ worth of food in one meal, and then had pie.

It might just be my favorite day of the year.

For my kids, though? Today might be even better.

Black Friday gets a bad rap, though an understandable one if you’ve ever worked retail. At its most commercial, it can be sickening—mad crushes of consumers chasing not-that-great deals for thing they don’t really want or need.

In our house, though—and I suspect in many others—Black Friday stands as the official kickoff to the Christmas season. It’s the day we buy our Christmas tree, the day we string our outdoor lights, the day all the other decorations come out of storage and the day we admit that there’s only one thing left to do this year, and that’s to get ready for Santa’s visit. It’s a holiday in its own right: Christmas, Day One.

The long-held mission of The Action Cookbook Newsletter’s Friday newsletters has been to get your weekends started on the right now. Well, if you’re lucky, your weekend’s already in full flush, and hopefully yesterday was a joyous day for you.

That doesn’t mean the Friday newsletter can’t help, though.

In today’s edition of the Friday Newsletter, we’ll feature:

• A great way to repackage those Thanksgiving leftovers!

• A simple, classic, highly-effective cocktail!

• Music to get you in the end-of-year mood, a book recommendation, movie discussion and the usual run of reader-submitted pets—including a very big personal announcement!

Let’s hit it.

7) Christmas Season? More like Live Más Season!

I’m not messing around with some sort of complicated recipe today; chances are you spent a good portion of yesterday either cooking or simply gorging, and there’s probably a good bit of it left.

Let’s simply repackage that in a novel way.

Let’s make a Thanksgiving Leftover Crunchwrap.