US Thanksgiving 2014

I moved to the rather bucolic and quite British-y city of Victoria, BC in Canada thirteen years ago from Los Angeles. A truly wonderful place to live and raise a family. A bit of culture shock however coming here from America. I still scoff when people complain about the traffic (traffic? You don’t know the meaning of traffic. If you stopped on an on-ramp in L.A. like people do here they’d run over you in their Hummer & never look back). I used to live in Mobile, Alabama as well – when folks here talk about the heavy rain it seems like a light mist to me – we used to have what I call frog-drownders almost every day where visibility would be so bad you had to pull off the road.

When US Thanksgiving (as I call it to differentiate it from the Canadian version held over a month before) rolls around though I always cook a traditional meal for my son and me especially after my son’s mother and I split up. I have learned over the years that I love to cook and especially to bake so there is a pecan pie in our future this evening. Cooking dinner brings back memories of my family growing up in my grandmother’s house in Illinois – the extended family would get together and the whole day was spent cooking up a storm by my grandma and her daughters and daughters-in-law. Of course back then it was really the women’s job and men were pretty much left out of the process which at the time was probably for the best.

The table leaves were installed in the dining room table and the card table set up in the living room for us kids. The special table protector laid on top of the big table then the tatted Irish lace tablecloth (woe betide he who spilled on it). The table was set with the fine china and silver from the sideboard where it was always stored waiting for special times like this. The pièce de résistance was my grandmother’s wicker cornucopia with the fake fruits and veggies spilling out of it.

Then the meal would appear. No buffet – we passed each dish around by hand. After the grand carving by one of my uncles (no electric knives allowed) there would be a gigantic platter of turkey and a plate of ham and lots of sides, stuffing (not dressing – it went into the bird by gosh), yams with marshmallows on top, green bean casserole with the canned onion rings, corn soufflé, mashed potatoes and gravy (I still can’t get my gravy to match my grandma’s). There were those store-bought rolls and jello salad and of course cranberry jelly replete with the ridges from the can quivering on the plate. And of course, dessert: pumpkin pie and apple pie and lemon meringue pie and chocolate pie.

But the food was just the excuse for family time. We of course ate at the kid’s table and it was both a rite of passage and a relief when we could finally graduate to the adult table to be in on the conversations. As new cousins were born and grew bigger they replaced us. My family was not one of those where you didn’t seat Aunt Sally next to Uncle Joe because of the feud they had from twenty years ago. There was alcohol but nobody got soused and made a scene. My grandma had the “big eyes” she would give to anybody who got out of line and raising eight kids had made her the absolute mistress of the household – as nice and kind as she was you didn’t cross her. Nobody dared ruin family time.

We were a religious family and prayer was part of the meal. It was important to be thankful for the year past, for our health and for each other. It was important that family was there and those who weren’t were missed. Life was slower when I was growing up and people weren’t as frazzled but I learned the value of thankfulness even just this one time during the year. Especially now with families split into nuclear and even subnuclear components like mine it is even more important than ever to stop on this day for a moment. Even if there is not an opportunity to have a special meal with friends and family the importance of expressing our feelings about the good that has happened (especially if not so good things have happened) and to remind ourselves what is truly important in life.

Things are not important. Money is not important. Influence and power and position are not important. Our relationships with our loved ones, our families and our friends are the only true measure of our worth in life. When we die the only people who will remember us are the people we care about and who care about us. It is truly important that we recognize that and express our feelings to each other even if it is once a year. Because without each other we are nothing.

Larry Earnhart
November 27, 2014