Saturday, November 17, 2018

This Thanksgiving...


Make Memories

Some memories are unforgettable, remaining ever vivid and heartwarming.”
Joseph B. Wirthlin

We're preparing to enter Thanksgiving week here in America. Already the grocery stores are overrun with folks shopping for hams and turkeys, their carts filled with bags of cranberries and oranges, pecans and brown sugar. It occurs to me that it is no coincidence that All Saints Day and Thanksgiving fall in the same month. Holidays always bring up memories of the “saints” in our families, both the living and the dead—the ones we love and the ones we dread. Viewing them from the perspective of age, I'm not sure which stories I love the most—the good, the bad, or the ugly.

My mother was a true traditionalist. Sometimes, it seemed as though she went to the grocery store and bought one of everything there. There had to be a turkey, of course, and usually a ham as well, for biscuits, and later for soup. I remember several turkeys cooked to the point that the bones fell out. They arrived at the table looking slightly medieval; just a heap of meat with bones sticking out all around. No need to slice. Her dressing is still the best I've ever tasted, and I can't replicate it to save my life. She preferred cooked cranberry sauce—probably because it was mostly sugar, and she did have herself a sweet-tooth. She baked for days—pecan pies and chocolate cakes and those dreadful fruitcake cookies—always thinking that there needed be variety so that people could pick and choose, or better yet, have one of each. Forget the fact that everyone was stuffed to their eyeballs before ever getting to the desserts.

One of my favorite Thanksgivings occurred toward the end of my father's life. We were gathered around a loaded table with Ian, who was nine or ten, trying to tell jokes while Jake made rye comments that all Ian's jokes required “the willing suspension of disbelief.” We all tried to replicate the Alabama drawl, “Why, dawlin', would you caah for some cawn, and perhaps you could send those precious little biscuits this way.” My dad laughed and laughed. By the next Thanksgiving, he was gone.

I know the holidays are stressful for many people. There's a performance quality to them, and we all have fallen short at one time or another. We often have to rub shoulders with people we never see otherwise, and never want to see in the first place. These are the dark “saints” of the family. They are fingernails on our chalkboards. It sometimes helps to look at them as players in a larger story—the story of a family with all the mythic characters. There are heroes and jesters, ladies and trollops, villains and innocents, soothers and the disturbers. A good story requires all of them to keep the action moving. It is sometimes fun to decide ahead of time which of your “saints” might fill each role. Keep tabs during the meal, take notes. Be sure to wear Sherlock Holmes' wellingtons and Inverness cape. If nothing else, it will make everyone slightly anxious about what you're up to. You may even become their dark saint.

Make some memories this Thanksgiving. They will sustain you in your dotage—I have that on very good authority.

                                                          In the Spirit,
                                                               Jane

No comments: