Saturday, November 26, 2016

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 74 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 four years. and enjoyed it, but there isn't the family and friends 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 lung cancer 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.  She passed away six weeks later at my brother's home, just after New Year's Day.

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 the week before, 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) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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2 comments:

Nancy Ward Remling said...

A Thanksgiving from years past in February no less...

https://remlinggenealogy.blogspot.com/2016/11/saturday-night-challenge-thanksgiving.html

Suzanne McClendon said...

I'm sorry about the loss of your mother. It is never easy to say good-bye to the people who brought us into this world.

I am also sorry for Linda's hurt toe. Bad turkey!

One Thanksgiving, our first one here in Texas, David and most of the kids went to David's mother's house for Thanksgiving dinner. I have always been an outsider as far as she was concerned, so I stayed home so that maybe there would be less drama. In order that I wouldn't be spending Thanksgiving home alone, Davey (our youngest son, now a Marine) stayed home with me. He was 10 years old at the time. It was a special time of bonding between the two of us. It was also a different menu that day. Instead of turkey and dressing and the usual Thanksgiving Day fare, we had pork chops because our boy loves all things pork. I can't remember what else we had with the pork chops, probably mashed potatoes and gravy, but I do remember that it was then that I knew he would never abandon me. He would leave home some day, sure, but he would always do his best to take care of me.

He has been a Marine for 2 1/2 years now and has missed all three Thanksgivings since he went in. I will always treasure that time with him on Thanksgiving 2004.

Have a blessed day!