Reality Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 22, we will celebrate Thanksgiving at our house. I thought I’d tell you what a typical Thanksgiving looks like at our house!

This year we are staying home. We aren’t traveling to a relative’s house and no one is going to come visit us over this holiday except my married son and his wife Stephanie. Three weeks ago, Stephanie volunteered to prepare some dishes for our Thanksgiving feast. She wanted to know what to make a few weeks early so she could practice preparing them. She’s a new bride and still finding her way around in the kitchen. She likes to make bread, so I told her she could make the bread of her choice and a dessert. I’m sure whatever she does will be wonderful.

Usually, I spend all Thanksgiving morning working like a crazy woman to prepare our family’s traditional Thanksgiving favorites. I was raised in the southern United States, so I tend to fix dishes in the southern tradition: Roasted turkey, cornbread dressing with giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, fruit salad and rolls. For dessert we like pecan pie, pumpkin pie and maybe a cake, usually chocolate. The nice thing about cooking all these foods is that I don’t have to cook anything else for 2 days. We just eat re-heated leftovers until they are gone.

My children are very attached to these traditional dishes. If I leave one out or prepared one differently, I hear moaning, groaning and suggestions that Thanksgiving is not Thanksgiving without these specific foods! So I keep this holiday’s food exactly the same so they will be happy. However, I’ve declared independence from the traditional Christmas Eve dinner, leaving me options to try new things. They really complained last year.

I also add mashed potatoes and gravy to the menu. This is for my husband. He was not raised in the south. Although, he enjoys most everything southern, he doesn’t like sweet potatoes. So I make him mashed potatoes so he is happy.

We use my formal china plates, crystal and silverware at this special family feast. We only use them at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It adds to the ‘specialness’ (not a real word) to our celebration. It means we have to wash everything by hand afterwards because they are too delicate for the dishwasher. We have enough hands around the house to get this task done quickly with only a little grumbling.

So far I’ve described slaving over a hot stove cooking food, people complaining about what is or isn’t served, someone unhappy about being forced to eat a dish he doesn’t like, and people mumbling under their breath about hand washing dishes when there is a perfectly good machine to do it.

Sounds pretty…unthankful? I agree it sounds that way, however, I think it’s just the reality of seven independent thinkers, gathering as family to sit down together on one of our favorite holidays. Jon and I have celebrated 27 Thanksgivings together with each child joining in as they were born. That’s a lot of time to build tradition. Tradition is part of what binds a family together. As we all sit around the table and look to my husband to say a Thanksgiving prayer to bless our meal, each of us are touched in our hearts with gratitude to God for being at the table to share a dinner with the people we love most in the world.

And that is what Thanksgiving is really all about.