Thanks for Giving
Today I was reading an article about Thanksgiving. That got me to thinking about Thanksgiving and the holidays in general. For most of my life the "it" place for Thanksgiving has been my grandmother's house. We had every holiday there. My grandmother would cook and we would eat and my grandparents would argue most of the time about little things and sometime during most Thanksgiving dinners my step grandfather would storm up the steps to his room pouting about something that he felt went wrong from someone using the wrong fork for their turkey to someone not putting the napkin correctly on their laps. All of was ridiculous and really didn't amount to much but to him it met that his Thanksgiving was in ruins. My grandmother would give him a little time to cool off and then go upstairs and tell him to stop acting like a jackass and come back down and join the rest of the family.
Needless to say our gatherings were entertaining. In a way I miss all the excitement of holidays past. My grandmother died in 2005 and my step grandfather died in 2004. So, that put an end to holidays at their home, our family home. The house was sold in 2007 so that was the end of an era. Since then we have sort of all done our own thing on the holidays. My cousins who used to gather with us at my grandparents house now gather at each other's houses and celebrate the way they want to and I see the pictures on Facebook most of the time. My uncle who used to come to the house, my mom's younger brother, he will stay at his apartment or go with his girlfriend to see her big family and call us to wish us a happy Thanksgiving.
At my house or apartment rather it is usually just me, my son, brother, mom and nephew. My sister might come over after she visits her mother in law but most of the time it is just us. Things have changed. There is no big house with a big dinning room table to sit around. In fact we don't sit at the table at all. It is more of a buffet style of Thanksgiving here. Most of the time we will order a Thanksgiving meal already cooked and pick it up, so nobody has to spend hours in a hot kitchen cooking all day. And it gives us all time to enjoy the meal. I will bake a couple of pies though and we all sit usually in the living room that is adjacent to the kitchen and eat. Not the traditional Thanksgiving way of the past but it is our present for now. It has worked this way for us for the past 8 years now so if it works why mess with "perfection"?
This year I don't see that there will be any changes to our new tradition. So, I will be on the look out for ready cooked Thanksgiving meals soon. Until our next holiday which would be Christmas and that one.
Needless to say our gatherings were entertaining. In a way I miss all the excitement of holidays past. My grandmother died in 2005 and my step grandfather died in 2004. So, that put an end to holidays at their home, our family home. The house was sold in 2007 so that was the end of an era. Since then we have sort of all done our own thing on the holidays. My cousins who used to gather with us at my grandparents house now gather at each other's houses and celebrate the way they want to and I see the pictures on Facebook most of the time. My uncle who used to come to the house, my mom's younger brother, he will stay at his apartment or go with his girlfriend to see her big family and call us to wish us a happy Thanksgiving.
At my house or apartment rather it is usually just me, my son, brother, mom and nephew. My sister might come over after she visits her mother in law but most of the time it is just us. Things have changed. There is no big house with a big dinning room table to sit around. In fact we don't sit at the table at all. It is more of a buffet style of Thanksgiving here. Most of the time we will order a Thanksgiving meal already cooked and pick it up, so nobody has to spend hours in a hot kitchen cooking all day. And it gives us all time to enjoy the meal. I will bake a couple of pies though and we all sit usually in the living room that is adjacent to the kitchen and eat. Not the traditional Thanksgiving way of the past but it is our present for now. It has worked this way for us for the past 8 years now so if it works why mess with "perfection"?
This year I don't see that there will be any changes to our new tradition. So, I will be on the look out for ready cooked Thanksgiving meals soon. Until our next holiday which would be Christmas and that one.
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