Thanksgiving

I intended to post this yesterday but Autumn came over and spent the afternoon and then about 10 minutes after she left to go back to Austin, Jade showed up and spent the early evening and then I had pecans to shell.

When I was growing up we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. My mother always said she didn’t want to go through the effort and then have to repeat it all a month later for Christmas Eve dinner, not the she did any of the cooking for that. We always had a maid/cook when I was growing up. I think her only contribution to that was making the angel food cake. 

Our family was very small…parents and three children and my maternal grandmother who lived in her own little apartment attached to our house by a porte cochere and they did not get along. After a few years Ma stopped coming over to our house and I don’t think Mother ever went over to visit her either. My mother was a menopause baby born long after my grandmother considered her days of raising children were over but her father doted on her and spoiled her rotten and then when my mother was 16, he died. Her two older sisters, older by a decade plus, were both childless and lived in different cities and Mother was not close to them either. My father’s family lived in Lubbock on the other side of this very large state and my mother did not like his family and they didn’t much care for her either so we rarely saw them. My father’s one sibling, his sister, had one child so I had one first cousin who I have only seen maybe about 10 times in my whole life.

When I was 12 or 13 my father rented a little beach house in the brand new development of Sea Isle on the far west end of Galveston Island, five miles of nothing past the previous last beach house community. Now of course the island is developed all the way to San Luis Pass and the bridge that connects the west end of the island with the mainland, a bridge that didn’t exist back then. My father bought a lot on the bay side on one of the three canals and had a house built. After that every Thanksgiving weekend, really every weekend, holiday, and summer, was spent there and Mother, unwilling to do Thanksgiving in the city, was doubly unwilling at the beach house. I don’t remember a single Thanksgiving dinner with my core family growing up. If my family did Thanksgiving before the beach house I don’t remember it but definitely never after.

After Marc and I got together we would go to his mom’s for Thanksgiving, easily the first decade or so when the kids were little. When Diane got old enough that she didn’t want to mess with it we would host Thanksgiving at our house. When I started the river guide era in 1993 when the kids were teens but not fully grown I spent most Thanksgivings on the river, one of the four annual trips. But then things started to fall apart for the outfitter and I quit guiding in 2002. By then Sarah and Mike had four kids and Thanksgiving was happening at their house. And so in the years since we have all gathered at Sarah’s house when we all lived in the city. Once we moved out here and Sarah and Mike followed a few years later we still gathered at her house until a few years ago we hosted it here. This year we once again gathered at Sarah’s house. With Mikey and Audra having two little ones it was easier for Marc and I to go there than everyone come here.

And so I got my cooking done, packed up everything and we spent a very fun afternoon and evening, four generations of us. And oh by all the powers that be we had so much food! The dressing, butternut squash casserole, and cranberry sauce I made; the smoked turkey and stuffed jalapeños Mikey made; the roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli rice casserole, deviled eggs, green beans, honeyed carrots, and apple cranberry pie that Sarah made, and the dinner rolls that Autumn made but no picture of all the food. Board games and card games followed, food was divvied up and Marc and I got home about 9:30.

Paisleigh set the table.

No words needed.

Mikey keeping an eye on Harrison.

Paisleigh telling me to wait before I took the pic.

Robin, Sarah, and Autumn.

Paisleigh having a moment.

Game time.