Thanksgiving Memories

What is your favorite way to spend Thanksgiving?

When I was younger, Thanksgiving was spent at my maternal grandmother's house. She has a small three bedroom house with one bathroom. All three of her kids, their kids (4 of us), and whatever significant others happened to be around at the time, would converge upon her house on Wednesday. That's 8-11 people in a three bedroom house with ONE bathroom.

It was the best time I ever had, though. My uncles are hilarious. I've had laugh lines on my face from the time I was eight because of them. My mother and my brother could certainly hold their own with them. They should have been a road act...we'd be millionaires by now. There was a lot of laughter at Thanksgiving in my family.

Grandma would get up early to prepare the turkey. The kids would all inevitably wake up since we were all camped out in the living room on the couch, chairs, and floor. She would proceed to make sausage and biscuits with gravy for breakfast--far better than you can get in any restaurant. She would have always had the desserts prepared before-hand, driving us kids to distraction wanting to get at the pumpkin and blueberry pies and the dirt pudding (pudding with crushed up oreos...mmmmmm.) Then the adults would start stumbling into the kitchen, which is the largest room in the house actually. Everyone--except the uncles--would commence to peeling potatoes, making dough for the homemade noodles, preparing the giblets for gravy (I hated that gravy), preparing the cranberries (no canned cranberries for this family), getting the green beans ready (not in a casserole), and preparing gallons of iced tea. It's amazing what you can do with only four burners on a stove. What a frenzy of activity it would be.

Then--the eating! This of course is when the uncles would materialize in the kitchen! I never developed a taste for the Turkey Leg because my mom and her brothers would fight over them every year. 2 legs, 3 siblings...such a clash of wills to witness. My mom is the oldest, so she usually won by using simple threats or reminding her brothers of the horrible things that they'd done when they were younger and she was in charge. My Uncle Tom and I usually dominated the pan with the mashed potatoes in it. Whichever grandkid was sitting on the outside of the table closest to the larger area of the kitchen usually got to enjoy their dinner in small bites between jumping up and down to retrieve forgotten cutlery, getting more ice for teas, and fetching things off the stove. We would stuff ourselves stupid and have to wait a couple of hours on desert.

During that wait, though, I always found myself with my cousins having to do dishes. I don't know how my brother always got out of it. Of course, Grandma didn't have a dishwasher. By the time we were through, there was usually someone rooting around in the kitchen for leftovers. I've always heard the Thanksgiving football game from the kitchen...never really saw it. Halftime saw everyone running for desert. I tell you, no one can eat a piece of pumpkin pie like my cousin Nathan; I don't know if he even tasted the pie underneath the tub of Cool Whip he put on it.

Afterwards, everyone would be dozing in the living room. Not easy to take a good long nap, what with being the iced tea drinkers we are and someone always leaping into the space on a piece of furniture that you'd vacated when you could no longer ignore your bladder. Uncle Tom would usually lead a procession to the local theater for the latest holiday movie while whomever was left behind got a rousing game of Scrabble going in the kitchen with more leftover munching.

It was a small, cramped house for that many people, but there was a lot of love and laughter. I miss it. I sometimes wish that everyone didn't have to grow up and have families of their own or move so far away. My mom is there now, sharing some laughter with her brothers and some anxiety about their aging mother. She's not as energetic as she used to be and she has finally started succumbing to her age and the exhaustion of taking care of a husband in the late stages of Parkinson's disease. There probably won't be half the amount of food that there used to be and there's finally a dishwasher--I say it's because Nathan and Tommy and I aren't around to wash them anymore. I'm sure that Nathan and Tommy with their eight kids will make an appearance, my brother and my niece Amanda may come over, and possibly some members of Don's family (my grandmother's husband). It won't ever be like it used to be.

I guess that's what memories are for, though.