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November 24, 2005
Despite the lack of gifts, plenty to be thankful for
By MIKE WOOD
As much as I love overeating and being with my family, Thanksgiving has never been that big of a deal for me. It’s always felt more like a day off than an actual holiday, probably because of the lack of presents.
It started when I was a kid, when a holiday wasn’t a holiday unless there were gifts involved. And I’m talking about real gifts … from a store. I wanted something in a box, or a basket, that I could put batteries in and play with. But year after year Thanksgiving guests would arrive bearing nothing more than smiles and pies, leaving me with nothing to open, unless you count all the walnuts I had to crack for my arthritic aunt.
It’s not that I dislike the day, it’s just that everything Thanksgiving has to offer is better done for some other holiday.
Take decorating, for example. My family needed the entire month leading up to Halloween, Christmas and Easter to properly decorate the house for the big day. But Thanksgiving? With maybe an hour to go before company started arriving, my brothers and I would “decorate� by setting out a few pilgrims and Indians, filling the cornucopia (but only after we took turns wearing it as a hat) and creating placecards for our guests. For some reason we all fought over who got to fill the relish tray with the assortment of sweet pickles and olives, so that became my dad’s job. He didn’t seem to mind, though, since it gave him the opportunity to steal a couple olives for his martini before sneaking off to watch football until it was time to carve the turkey.
My mom’s job was to cook the turkey, a task she approached with the delicate precision of a bomb squad, since she considered the turkey to be a time bomb that would kill us all if not cooked long enough (though she didn’t seem quite so concerned for our health the year she accidentally cooked the turkey with the plastic bag of giblets still stuffed inside. “It’ll be fine� she declared, peeling off the melted pieces of probably toxic plastic.)
Normally a late riser, she’d set her alarm for 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving in order to put the turkey in the oven so it could cook long enough — a time determined by a complicated formula derived by scientists at NASA, but later made obsolete by Butterball’s pop-up timer. She would then spend the rest of the day sticking to a strict schedule of basting.
When we were really little, every time she basted the turkey she’d start shrieking and screaming, claiming that it was trying to fly out of the oven. “Not quite done yet,� she’d say before shooing us back into the living room to continue watching the Macy’s Umpteenth Annual Thanksgiving Day Parade — a six-hour snoozefest that she somehow always persuaded us to watch.
And that’s another area in which Thanksgiving is clearly lacking: good TV specials. Christmas had Frosty and Rudolph and Charlie Brown. Thanksgiving had … balloons, an endless parade of big boring balloons, their tedious passing narrated by the likes of Lorne Greene, who would share “facts� about them as they floated by. We didn’t care that six people could swim in Snoopy’s supper dish or that Bullwinkle’s nose was so big you could park a Volkswagen in it. All we cared about was seeing Santa, who brought up the rear of the parade, ushering in the start of the real holiday season.
But the star of this day was dinner, which somehow always managed to coincide with half-time.
And while we weren’t big on starting dinner with a prayer, we were good at toasting.
We were all professional toasters, except for that one year my cousin, trying to clink a glass across the table, accidentally tipped a lit candle into the napkin-lined basket of rolls, setting them on fire. After the flames were extinguished, someone — I like to think it was me — held up a burnt roll and said, "Well, you did say you wanted to make a toast!"
Yes, we did have the traditional "kiddie table" but it was purely for logistical purposes. We never felt left out. We knew there was simply not enough room for everyone at the main table. And it didn’t really matter how old you were, if you were someone’s kid you sat at the kiddie table. Therefore, graduating to the adult table didn’t have that rite of passage feel for us — if a seat opened up, it was only because someone had died (or even worse, was spending Thanksgiving with a girlfriend’s family.)
And while we could fill the seat of a departed loved one, we could never take their place. But we kept them alive by sharing stories and toasting in their honor so that the newcomers to the kiddie table would know what it was like to eat with Grampa, George, Gramma Rose, Auntie, Uncle Paul, Bobby....
And the funny thing is, as much as I liked getting them, I can’t recall a single Christmas gift any of them gave me, but I do have countless memories of conversations and moments from Thanksgivings past — and I know now that it’s not their gifts I’ve been missing, it’s them.
Posted by getout on November 24, 2005 8:17 AM
