I love Thanksgiving
It's always been my favorite holiday and my memories of it as a kid seem to get better the older I get.
Our Thanksgiving consisted of my mom and I driving the hour from Tulsa to Bartlesville to my grandparent's house. They had a small house but it was always stuffed with people. The kitchen, the service porch and the dining room would be full of food and fat ladies in print dresses and kids in their best clothes and guys who at the time wore trousers with cuffs and polished shoes and hair oil to slick down the combover. These were my relatives or old friends of the family who became Aunt and Uncle because of friendship, not blood.
There really weren't a lot of kids--just me and my two cousins. My mom, my aunt and my uncle were definitely the youngest of the adults. The ladies always gathered around the table, the men always crowded around the TV in the living room and us kids sat wherever we could find a space. I was always with my grandpa around the TV, watching the Dallas Cowboys play football. That's how I got my love of the team. My grandpa loved the Cowboys, I idolized my grandpa, so the Cowboys will always be about him and those Thanksgiving day games. And yeah, I made myself cry thinking about that.
The food was always the best at Thanksgiving. My grandmother would make two kinds of dressing, one with oysters for the adults (as a kid I always thought oysters were some sort of adult food) and without for the kids. We'd have fifteen different kinds of pies, and eleven differents kids of salads (including the yummy kind with marshmallows) and turkey and ham because my mom doesn't like turkey, and black olives that us kids would put on all our fingers and run around looking like some sort of mutant tree frog. I was a tall, skinny kid (somewhere around puberty I shrunk and expanded out) surrounded by lots of great aunts as well as a grandmother and great grandmother and of course they would always tell me I needed to eat more pie. And who was I to say no? Thanksgiving was made for fattening up skinny kids and this was definitely before organics and zero trans fat and Smart Balance anything. Just FYI, my great grandmother is 103, soon to be 104 (she's got dementia but is in good health), and my grandmother is 84. My dad has always said the women in my family are too mean to die. He might be right.
I went home for Thanksgiving not long after I moved to Northern Virginia in 1987. My grandfather passed away in the mid 70's and my grandmother had remarried around the same time (they divorced in the early 70's). The old friends didn't come around any more and many of the old relatives had passed away. In their place were my step grandfather's dysfunctional kids. My aunt divorced my uncle and then married a man with two boys and they spent Thanksgiving with his parents. My mom was living with my stepfather then and they decided to do their own Thanksgiving with his kids and brothers. There wasn't a tradition any more and for me, the memories were just that. I haven't been back to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving since.
Now I go to my dad and stepmother's for Thanksgiving. They live about a mile away and my sister as well as a good family friend are there. I take my sweet potato casserole and arrive around 2pm. We don't eat until 4pm, which is always right when the Cowboys game starts (never fails). Sometimes I leave with a few leftovers but not often so I've started my own tradition. On Friday I make my own mini Thanksgiving meal. I buy a small boneless turkey, make stuffing and green bean casserole (the kind with French onions on top--I love that!) and more sweet potato casserole and a pumpkin pecan pie from an old Southern recipe. I share the turkey with the kitties and I get lots of leftovers. I love the leftovers.
This is my tradition now and I like it just fine. I'll always have the good memories of my childhood Thanksgiving and you know, that's what I'm thankful for. Well, that and Dallas Cowboy football...
Our Thanksgiving consisted of my mom and I driving the hour from Tulsa to Bartlesville to my grandparent's house. They had a small house but it was always stuffed with people. The kitchen, the service porch and the dining room would be full of food and fat ladies in print dresses and kids in their best clothes and guys who at the time wore trousers with cuffs and polished shoes and hair oil to slick down the combover. These were my relatives or old friends of the family who became Aunt and Uncle because of friendship, not blood.
There really weren't a lot of kids--just me and my two cousins. My mom, my aunt and my uncle were definitely the youngest of the adults. The ladies always gathered around the table, the men always crowded around the TV in the living room and us kids sat wherever we could find a space. I was always with my grandpa around the TV, watching the Dallas Cowboys play football. That's how I got my love of the team. My grandpa loved the Cowboys, I idolized my grandpa, so the Cowboys will always be about him and those Thanksgiving day games. And yeah, I made myself cry thinking about that.
The food was always the best at Thanksgiving. My grandmother would make two kinds of dressing, one with oysters for the adults (as a kid I always thought oysters were some sort of adult food) and without for the kids. We'd have fifteen different kinds of pies, and eleven differents kids of salads (including the yummy kind with marshmallows) and turkey and ham because my mom doesn't like turkey, and black olives that us kids would put on all our fingers and run around looking like some sort of mutant tree frog. I was a tall, skinny kid (somewhere around puberty I shrunk and expanded out) surrounded by lots of great aunts as well as a grandmother and great grandmother and of course they would always tell me I needed to eat more pie. And who was I to say no? Thanksgiving was made for fattening up skinny kids and this was definitely before organics and zero trans fat and Smart Balance anything. Just FYI, my great grandmother is 103, soon to be 104 (she's got dementia but is in good health), and my grandmother is 84. My dad has always said the women in my family are too mean to die. He might be right.
I went home for Thanksgiving not long after I moved to Northern Virginia in 1987. My grandfather passed away in the mid 70's and my grandmother had remarried around the same time (they divorced in the early 70's). The old friends didn't come around any more and many of the old relatives had passed away. In their place were my step grandfather's dysfunctional kids. My aunt divorced my uncle and then married a man with two boys and they spent Thanksgiving with his parents. My mom was living with my stepfather then and they decided to do their own Thanksgiving with his kids and brothers. There wasn't a tradition any more and for me, the memories were just that. I haven't been back to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving since.
Now I go to my dad and stepmother's for Thanksgiving. They live about a mile away and my sister as well as a good family friend are there. I take my sweet potato casserole and arrive around 2pm. We don't eat until 4pm, which is always right when the Cowboys game starts (never fails). Sometimes I leave with a few leftovers but not often so I've started my own tradition. On Friday I make my own mini Thanksgiving meal. I buy a small boneless turkey, make stuffing and green bean casserole (the kind with French onions on top--I love that!) and more sweet potato casserole and a pumpkin pecan pie from an old Southern recipe. I share the turkey with the kitties and I get lots of leftovers. I love the leftovers.
This is my tradition now and I like it just fine. I'll always have the good memories of my childhood Thanksgiving and you know, that's what I'm thankful for. Well, that and Dallas Cowboy football...