Monday memory: Thanksgiving

I doubt my family's story was THAT unique, but it sets me up for the next post.

Photo by SJ 📸 on Unsplash

In the town where I grew up, there was a family that pretty much had their annual reunion at Thanksgiving: legend has it they cooked for fifty to sixty people, family members spanning five generations. I could just imagine all of them crammed into every nook and cranny of a house that was considered large at the time, but would today probably be of average size.

As for me, I always remember Thanksgiving when I was a kid as a one-woman show: my mom.

Growing up, it was always just the five of us: Mom and Dad, my two brothers, and me. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy, maybe some cranberry dish I never ate anyway. And pumpkin pie. I ate that.

Eventually it got to be a little larger, once my brothers and I got significant others and/or wives. But by the time of the last one I was at, back in 2004 just before my mom and dad moved to Florida, it may have been back to the main five. (Perhaps my brothers both brought significant others by then, maybe Tom was married. The memory grows fuzzy.) That was the one I returned to the ‘burbs of Toledo for, just a month after moving down here to take a job.

While I was married the first time, my ex and I celebrated Thanksgiving twice: the Sunday before with her family, and the day of with mine. It got that way because the other side of the family went to a different side of the family on Thanksgiving Day, so they needed two celebrations as well. Even when Kim and I got together, for a few years there were two dinners on Thanksgiving - one with my friends who “adopted” me as a single-again bachelor in the early afternoon, and the other with her side at suppertime. Sadly, my Thanksgiving co-host Michele departed this life almost eight years ago, felled by cancer, so it’s now just one dinner.

Anyway, as a kid we had fun on Thanksgiving. Yeah, we’d sort of half-watch the Macy’s parade, but we could smell the turkey cooking. Then, we’d fiddle with the antenna in a usually vain attempt to watch the Lions game from the Cleveland or Fort Wayne station, because Toledo was affected by the old NFL blackout rule and it was hard to sell out the cavernous Silverdome in time to waive the restriction. By the time we figured out the game wasn’t worth trying to watch through the fuzzy signal it was time to sit down and eat anyway.

Usually supper was about halftime of the Cowboys game, and we’d get our third or fourth helpings of the turkey. (After a day or two of sandwiches, we’d top off the weekend with turkey chow mein on Saturday or Sunday. My brother LJ loved the stuff.) Then the fun began: cutthroat UNO - so called because all three of us kids played to win. We eventually set up a rule where people drew cards to determine their position at the table because none of the wives/significant others/kids/Mom wanted to sit beside us - no mercy for them! And I always was tasked with keeping score.

That would go on for two or three rounds, and then it was time to go home. At the time, none of us lived far from Mom and Dad - maybe a 20-30 minute drive at most. And since there wasn’t much open - back then, Black Friday was still reserved for oh-dark-hundred Friday - we would just go home, digest all our food, and watch whatever was on the idiot box. (This was the era when the World Wide Web was dial-up at best.)

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize there was one thing missing from our family celebration: the thanks. As a kid, we just assumed everything would be provided for us, and not being part of a religious family we never really paused to be thankful about our blessings. We actually used to joke about it: Mom might ask, who’s going to say the grace, and one of more of us would say, “grace - now let’s eat!”

I’ve had a few unique Thanksgiving experiences over the years - after all, I’m old enough to have witnessed the classic TV of the WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop as it first aired, ironically, several weeks before Thanksgiving - but as I get older I’m less about the food and more about being thankful for the blessings my family and I have received over the year, even if on the surface it didn’t seem like a whole lot. (This one in particular will be painful, as we lost my mother-in-law this year.) But there will still be things to say grace over when we sit down to eat on Thursday.

It’s been a good life: going from being the scorekeeper at the Thanksgiving UNO game as a teenager/young man to - Good Lord willing - giving the blessing at next Thanksgiving dinner Thursday. I’ll do my best to express all of our thanks when I give the blessing.

Don’t forget: you can also Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.