Growing up Without a Thanksgiving Tradition

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays,  that I don’t have a lot of expectations for...

Growing up, it’s a holiday I barely remember. I don’t remember my mother having ever cooked  a turkey. I don’t recall any stuffing, or gatherings of large groups of extended family. My father worked in a textile mill, often 7 days a week.  I am fairly certain,  he didn’t have to work on Thanksgiving Day, but for some  reason , I don’t recall the day being celebrated in a very special way. 

Yet, there are some extraordinary  Thanksgivings,   that I recall over the years, but NOT for the reasons you might expect …
 
Before I was married, my fiancé and I travelled an hour or so south, to share Thanksgiving  with my best friend and her husband,  in their first home. The  turkey was picture- perfect, accompanied by ALL  the traditional fix’ins. It was beautiful!  We  began getting drunk while preparing the hors doeurves, homemade  spinach- filled knocchi  balls. Twenty years later, I still remember crawling on my hands and knees on the floor, and sleeping in a water bed that continued to move,  even after I stopped. For any of you that may be contemplating drinking a lot of alcohol on Thanksgiving, I am warning  you STRONGLY against it, for obvious reasons!
 
Then, there was the year I made my first turkey… Or TRIED to make my first turkey!  If you have never cooked a turkey before, it  is a strange and mysterious thing to prepare.  I called the “Butterball Hotline”, because I could NOT call my mother about this. She was a terrible cook.  This  turkey had  something like a dozen crevices for hiding little pouches of stuff…It was like a New York salesman on the streets, wearing a trench coat, with pockets full of fake Rolex Watches. I kept pulling mysterious bags and blobs out of this turkey’s crevices: gizzards, livers, heart, lungs, Van Gogh’s ear, Jimmy Hoffa, my third grade book report, odd  socks, my virginity... ALL the things I have EVER lost over the years, were found  in that turkey.
 
When we purchased our first home, I was SO excited about Thanksgiving.  Our "new"  house  was actually a 1930’s brick bungalow. In the kitchen, there was an old built-in stainless steel wall oven, that looked like the rear end of an old Studebaker automobile…we called  it our “Betty Crocker Oven”. I  loved that oven! In fact, the day we first spotted this house “For Sale”, we went inside to find the little old lady who lived there,  baking a homemade apple pie… the kind with a criss-cross  lattice crust on top. It was a beautiful pie and it smelled like Home. Honestly, the lure of that old oven, and the promises it held for me in creating my own holiday traditions, were a big part of the reason we bought that house.
 
That year, we were young and poor  from buying a house we couldn’t really afford. I had purchased the  “Blue Light Special” turkey,  on sale. Did you know, that you can often buy really large turkeys, really cheaply, much cheaper than the more popular 10-15 lb. turkeys? So, here I was with an ENORMOUS 25 lb. turkey.  I wanted to create a PERFECT Thanksgiving meal. The preparations went more  smoothly this time, but a few hours into the bake cycle, the coil went out  on my “Betty Crocker Oven”. There was NO WAY for me  to finish baking the turkey. None of the neighbors were at home, and besides, everyone’s ovens would have been filled with their own turkeys and side dishes , anyway. No room for this GI-NORMOUS turkey, that would barely fit in an oven! We celebrated anyway, nibbled on the skin outside, and baked it more the next day after a new coil was installed.
 
Years later, there was the sad Thanksgiving after my father had just died in October. We had one of those Thanksgivings,  where you feel like an orphan. We were invited to join others for their celebrations, but honestly, we did not feel like celebrating. To make it “easy”, my husband and I decided that we would go to one of the local restaurants, K & W Cafeteria,   for our Thanksgiving meal. It’s a very generous thing for restaurants and shelters to serve Thanksgiving to people, no matter the need . The workers come in to work, instead of spending time with their own families, to serve those who may not have anywhere else to go. Yet, it was really sad, there, celebrating with strangers, eating food prepared by strangers, without my dad. It made me miss my dad, even more. THAT was the year I decided, that as long as I was able, I would claim Thanksgiving as my own holiday. Family and friends could come, or not. I would celebrate Thanksgiving at my own table, with my own prepared food, with my own little family, and anyone else that would like to come.
 
That is what I have continued to do, for 17 years , now, although  I have tried to get over feeling pressured to create that  PERFECT Thanksgiving.  Over the years, I have discovered there is really NO such thing. Some years, the turkey is dry, the friends get divorced, people die, family rifts happen, and  the oven breaks. Thanksgiving is a reminder to us all , that it is NOT the creation of a perfect  meal, but the cultivation of gratitude, while loving and living  imperfectly ,  that is the measure of a successful Thanksgiving. 
 
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!