Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Thanksgiving Memories

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) We just celebrated Thanksgiving in the USA, and many of us have celebrated it every year for decades.  For this SNGF, please share a favorite Thanksgiving memory - it can be sentimental, humorous, reflective, etc.

2)  Share your Thanksgiving memory with us in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.

Here's mine:

I've celebrated 73 Thanksgivings now, and very few are memorable.  I don't recall my first one, being barely a month old, or many from my childhood.  For every year of my childhood and early adulthood, up until the time I married and had children, my family would go to my Carringer grandparents house for Thanksgiving dinner.  The fare was the typical carved turkey cooked in the oven, mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, and pumpkin pie a la mode. 

When I married Linda, and after our children were born, we took turns hosting Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and brothers.  Linda brought her own Thanksgiving traditions to our palate, sweet potatoes and boiled onions as I recall.  We always enjoyed the football games in the afternoon, playing outside in the yard or on the street with the kids, and eating in the late afternoon.  We had to set up a kids table after awhile in the living room and usually had 8-10 people around our dining room table in a relatively small dining room.  The big game we played was "toss the peas in the wine glass" or "toss the balled-up napkin in the drink glass."  My brothers and father were real competitive, so this was fun.  My mother hated this "tradition."  My wife and my brothers' wives tolerated it, and the kids wanted to take part in it.

For several years, friends invited us to their homes to have Thanksgiving dinner, and that was fun and saved Linda the task of cooking the feast for just the two of us.  Now, with the kids gone, Linda and I have gone out to a restaurant the last three years. and enjoyed it, but there isn't the family and friend camaraderie there.  It was like a weekend evening out.

My two most memorable Thanksgiving meals were:

1)  In November 2001, my mother had decided to not have any more treatments, and was slowly dying.  My brothers and I tried to make her last Thanksgiving meal memorable - we took her out to a Thanksgiving dinner at one of her favorite restaurants.  We shared laughs and stories, and shared how special she had been for each of us.  

2)  In 2012, Linda was going to cook a Thanksgiving turkey and all of the accompaniments, and Tami and her family were going to come, along with several of our friends.  Linda put the turkey in the freezer, and the Sunday before Thanksgiving, she decided to take it out and thaw it in the refrigerator.  It slipped from her hands while removing it from the freezer, and fell to the floor crushing the right toe next to the little toe.  The toe was smashed and lacerated (think of dropping a 14 pound bowling ball on your foot...).  It was 5:30 a.m., but she managed to wake me up, I got her to the Emergency Room, and they stitched it up, took X-rays, gave her pain meds, etc.  Tami brought her family down early to take over making the Thanksgiving dinner, the friends came as scheduled, and the meal was a great success.  This is one reason we now go out to a restaurant...

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Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver