Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Maybe because it was the one holiday we’d do when I was a kid, I now associate turkey day with family and comfort.
When I was growing up in north central Illinois, my grandparents lived just across the street. Although we didn’t celebrate the traditional holidays, Dad did make one (somewhat grudging) exception for Thanksgiving. Unlike most holidays, Thanksgiving does not have pagan origins; it is pretty much a totally created and secular holiday. Oh, it has become somewhat “religion-ized” through the years; we are supposed to give thanks for the bounty we have (presumably to God, which for some qualifies Thanksgiving as a religious holiday), but for most people it is primarily an opportunity to get together with family for lots of comfort food and atmosphere. So we would all troop over to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house across the street on Thanksgiving Thursday and eat everything in sight. I don’t want this to sound clichéd, but it was wonderful.
After Grandma and Grandpa passed away, we would have the dinner at our house; I seem to recall that the Andersons (Dad’s sister’s family) joined us once or twice. Then when the three of us got older and had moved away, we made it our tradition. Over the years we’ve met in Chicago at Kathleen’s, here in California and at Jim’s; as Mom got more frail and couldn’t travel we all agreed to go to the Jim’s house in Bloomington. With Mom’s passing our options opened a bit, so this year we hosted in California.
Since we can, we’ve created a number of traditions around Thanksgiving. Who prepares what, the activities we intersperse throughout the day, even what goes on the menu have all become part of the process and things we look forward to each year. The Main Event (Thanksgiving Day dinner) usually begins the day before with Menu Development. I always think it’s a good idea to have way too much food, with Cathy helping to rein in my excesses and keep our caloric intake less like a football team and more like normal people. Leftovers play a major and important role, so we make sure to prepare enough for goodies the days after. On the big day I am usually in charge of “bird-zilla” (originally the larger the better, although lately we’ve discovered that smaller birds are actually tastier, so we’ve scaled back a bit); Kathleen does her famous baked apples, and Cathy handles side dishes while Jim keeps us well supplied with snacks and killer martinis. Kathleen also organizes champagne and other goodies; we pick a jigsaw puzzle that we all work, and we pick a movie or two to watch.
As I said, this year we hosted here in California, and it was great. We had a fire going in the fireplace, our jigsaw puzzle underway and the first champagne toast by 10:00 am. Food preparation started in the early afternoon and we sat down to eat at 5:00. It was exactly what we had looked forward to. Jim and Devon weren’t with us this year but that was the only negative; everything else was perfect.
Only 50 weeks to go before we get to do it again. Can’t wait!
