(Photo credits: Pintrest)

With Thanksgiving coming up on us next week I thought I would take some time to look back on some truly memorable Thanksgivings. Some of them are classic, like the image above that we all grew up being taught was the standard. Others fell far short of this standard and one in particular is memorable just for the utter disaster it turned out to be.

But let’s start with the standard, you know that Thanksgiving kind of day when you arrive at your grandparent’s house to find the table spread with an elegant tablecloth, set with the finest china and my grandmother, my father’s mother, impeccably dressed in a beautifully starched dress, wearing heels, a string of pearls and not a hair out of place. These were the Thanksgivings of my early childhood.

My grandparents’ house was large, elegant and we ate in the formal dining room. You know the one with the china cabinet lining the wall, filled with the dishes that were only used for special occasions. There was a chandelier and taper candles already burning in their fancy candle sticks on the table. Believe it or not these kind of Thanksgivings do, or at least in my experience, did exist! My grandmother was the most excellent hostess and if you ate a meal at her house, Thanksgiving or otherwise, you could expect perfection and nothing less. These were very formal affairs with everyone in my father’s family dressed appropriately for the occasion. My grandfather in his dress shirt and tie, myself and my sister wearing our best dresses or maybe even a new dress just for the occasion. There was nothing relaxed or casual about Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparent’s home. Best behavior was expected, there was no television blaring in the background, instead family members had conversations with each other across the festive table my grandmother had prepared for us all. Because I was young, it’s probable that I have idealized all of this a bit. I’m sure if I had peeked into the kitchen I may have seen pots and pans stacked high and I’m sure my grandmother was frazzled, but she never let on that she was. This was her yearly performance for the family and she executed it perfectly. These earliest memories of Thanksgiving were the foundation for all the others that followed.

After my parents divorced we switched to having Thanksgiving dinner with my mother’s family. These are some of the best memories I have of childhood Thanksgivings. We would arrive at mother’s aunt and uncle’s house, dressed in comfortable clothing, greeted by loud and rambunctious cousins and dogs. There were always dogs, something that my father’s family never had. So into this sea of humans and canines we would wade. You see, Auntie & Uncle Lou, as they were called, lived in a very small house in a modest section of town. We didn’t enter through the front door, no this was Maine, we all entered through the back door. That back door brought you directly into the “den” or what we would call a family room now. The TV was always on, the dogs would bark and jump on you, all of the cousins, forced to stay in this room until it was time to eat, filled the space and I remember stepping around people and dogs just to get into the room. Coats would be taken off and handed to someone who would take them upstairs and dump them on a bed, as there was literally not even a closet to put them in! From the den you entered the small kitchen which was full of women. Auntie was running the show and she was hot, sweaty, large and in charge. In this tiny space, and it was tiny, the total counter space couldn’t have been more than six feet, she prepared a meal with the help of her sister, other aunts and older cousins. This band of women created a meal as a group, not like my grandmother who appeared to do it all herself while still keeping her dress clean. This was a loud affair with lids flying, dirty spoons tossed into the sink, side dishes lifted up in the air and passed over head and pies. What seemed like hundred of pies, but more realistically were probably a couple of dozen, seemed to be perched everywhere in that kitchen.

Because the house was so small the children were forced to stay out of the way and because of this we were planted in front of the TV in the den to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade until we were called to eat. Out here in the den with the dogs and the wood stove throwing off more heat then was really needed in a house full of people, we would poke and tease each other out of boredom and anticipation. One boy cousin particularly I remember as being most troublesome, but as we did back then, we learned patience even in the face of adversity! When we were finally called to come eat it was not to a beautifully set dining table, no instead there was one table in the dining room “space”, really just an area that you walked through on your way to the living room, that seated four, possibly six at the most. In the living room there were folding tables set up and then a small card table at the end. The official dining table was reserved for Auntie & Uncle Lou and my great grandparents. The rest of the adults sat at the folding tables or even went back to the kitchen table, where they moved pies and dirty dishes out of the way to find space to eat. The children were sent to the small card table where we continued the mischief we had started in front of the TV. All of these memories are of noise, chaos, and the bustling energy that comes from a family, including young children, all gathering into a space far to small for that many people but enjoying it all the same! It was a great way to grow up.

As I moved on into adulthood and got married it was time for me to begin to develop my own traditions of what this holiday would look like. Thanksgiving 1984 found me living in Phoenix Arizona and a brand new wife. I had never cooked a meal in my life let alone a Thanksgiving meal thousands of miles away from my family. Enter Sharon Storrer, an attorney at the law firm I was working at. One day in mid November, she walked over to my desk and handed me this Betty Crocker Cookbook and a box of oven bags. Her instructions to me were, “Follow the directions on the box of oven bags to cook your turkey. Everything else you need to make you will find in this cookbook. Good luck.” She wasn’t wrong. To this day, thirty nine Thanksgivings later, I still cook my turkeys in these oven bags!! And I had to screenshot a photo of the cookbook from the internet because that original Betty Crocker Cookbook is so dirty, so well loved, with pages falling out of it, that I couldn’t possibly show it to you all. A few years ago a found Sharon on Facebook and reached out to her. I thanked her so much for being kind and helping a very, very young me!! I will never forget her kindness for that!

Over those years, as children were added to the family, my own Thanksgiving meals didn’t resemble the ones I had grown up with at all. Due to the fact that Christmas was a hectic day trying to visit all of the many sets of grandparents that made up our children’s lives, we had decided early on that Thanksgiving would be just our own little family. The one holiday where we stayed home. So as I spent Thanksgiving day cooking a meal for our family of seven, it wasn’t much different then any other meal I cooked, except there was the smell of turkey filling the house. The children watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or did whatever they normally did on any given Saturday. We ate our meal, all seven of us around the same table we ate at every day. I would clean up and then when we were living near family we might go off and have pie with a grandparent here or there. During those years when we lived away from family I remember it became a tradition to go to the movies after we ate. There was no fancy dressing up, no formal dining room, no house full of cousins or chaos. Thanksgiving was mostly just another day with a really big meal in the middle.

Of all of the Thanksgivings I spent with my children the most memorable two were the ones we spent in Disney World. That first year we thought it best financially to take the kids to the Golden Corral for Thanksgiving. Buffets are always a great way to feed five children when four of them are teenage boys! I will never forget as I set my plate down on the table, mounded over with turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes and all of the other Thanksgiving foods I glanced around at what my children had found on the buffet for their meal. Every single one of them were eating pepperoni pizza!!! I remember looking a them and saying “for crying out loud do you think you could get a little turkey on your next trip up there?!” The following year, not wanting a repeat of the pizza Thanksgiving, we splurged and made reservations at the restaurant inside of the Contemporary Hotel at Disney. You know the one that the monorail passes through. There we were, a family enjoying a real Thanksgiving meal with all the correct foods! As the monorail train rumbled below us I cut into my turkey only to realize it wasn’t real turkey at all!!! It was some kind of canned, pressed, processed, moulded turkey flavored meat substance smothered in gravy!! Clearly nothing beats homemade so we stayed home for Thanksgivings after that!

But the most memorable Thanksgiving of all time happened in the late 1970’s and thankfully I can say I was only a participant and not responsible for this epic fail. As seen in the advertisement above, microwave ovens were brand new on the scene and anyone who was anyone was snatching up this cutting edge technology. My own aunt was no different. She and my uncle had purchased one of these new ovens and they were going to host Thanksgiving for the family that year. The all new microwave oven was going to cut down on the cooking time and make meal prep so much more easier! The future was here and like all young people, of any generation, my aunt and uncle were going to embrace modernism and carry us all into the future!

So all of the chaos that made up my childhood Thanksgivings moved from my mother’s aunt & uncle’s small, cramped house and over to the more spacious and modern home of my mother’s sister. As we arrived we were not met with the smell of roasting turkey as one would expect on Thanksgiving day. Instead we all filed carefully past the new microwave oven that was in the middle of the kitchen table, the light on inside where we could see the large turkey slowly spinning on the carousel plate. As my great grandmother leaned down and looked at it I remember her making a comment that the turkey didn’t look like it was browning up very well. I think we all thought it would, eventually, I mean this oven was cooking the turkey right?. Or at the least my aunt expected that it would turn brown!. Sadly it did not and when it came time for my uncle to slice up that turkey for all of us to consume, the sight of the still pasty white bird left us all queasy. I remember that Thanksgiving being the year of the side dish!