Thanksgiving Time

Every year at this time I start getting a bit nostalgic for days gone by. Big family gatherings, turkey and pumpkin pie and all the trimmings of a great holiday weigh heavily on my mind. I wish I could bring back loved ones passed on, but I know that has to be satisfied with a memory.

I remember when I was a kid, our holidays spent with cousins. My mom and my aunt took turns cooking, but turkey was always the centerpiece of a very full table, along with dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, a vegetable tray, a fruit salad, a jello salad, corn and rolls. Oh, don't forget the olives - enough to cover the ends of our fingers at one time and then some. Or the pies, pecan and pumpkin. My family also liked banana pudding, the recipe on the Nilla Wafers box.

Today my daughters cook dinner; I do the honors on occasion. So they plan the menu. When one daughter was ready to deliver a baby in a few months and didn't want to cook a large turkey dinner, her Thanksgiving menu was a lasagne dish. Somehow, that just didn't fit the season, though it was delicious. I still craved turkey.

Turkey and memories.

I remember once when we were all visiting around the table after a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and my aunt and uncle. All of a sudden somebody looked down and saw a set of false teeth on the floor, and exclaimed, "Whose teeth are on the floor?" My aunt had dropped them from her lap and didn't even know it. Was she ever embarrassed.

Funny how you remember things.

Do you have traditions a holiday wouldn't be complete without? What's your family tradition? Is it also turkey? Who carves the turkey? Do you have traditions that have survived the ages? Do you share stories and memories around the table?

I'm lucky to have an abundance of good memories, no matter where the gathering. Dinner at my inlaws, once I married, was hectic and abundant. My mother-in-law cooked and seemed to have a never-ending menu with something for everyone along with the best sweet dills I have ever tasted; she canned them every year. She also made killer rolls and rich, robust gravy.

My own mother was a wonderful cook. She used to get up at 4:00 a.m. some Thanksgiving mornings to be sure the turkey was done before my Dad had to go to work on swingshift, if that happened to be what he worked. No cooking bags back then to speed up the process.

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