Many of you are bustling around in a kitchen right now, basting a turkey, slicing, chopping, dicing and otherwise preparing a lovely feast for your family to share a few short hours from now. Me? I’m not cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year, my husband is away and we are too far from any of our friends and family to share the occasion with them, so the girls and I are just going to have a relaxing day and start a new tradition with them (or carry on an older family tradition) of watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.
I have fond memories of watching this same parade, year after year, always “out of the way,” in my parents bedroom with my siblings so they could clean and cook without having to worry (too much) without us. After awhile, my dad would join us with his Xth cup of coffee for the day and watch silently for a bit before he suddenly remembered some project he was working on in the garage and disappear. I can remember having friends who moved from NYC, whose parents fondly remembered getting up early and bundling up to sit on a sidewalk to watch the parade and the stories about the sheer amount of preparation and competition that goes into readying for this particular parade…. it’s nice to be able to remember all those moments while sharing in the delight of my own two girls as they recognize the big balloon characters and ask “why?” a bazillion times while bopping to the music and shouting “WOW!!”
There are so many school and childhood memories about Thanksgiving that I can remember. In grade school, we learned all about the Mayflower, pilgrims, maize, diseases, harsh living conditions, Indians and what it meant to share. By middle school age, I kept myself entertained by watching movies like “The Addams Family” and delighting in the misfortune of a Thanksgiving play gone wrong ….
Then as we dressed up in more fancy clothes than we normally would wear to dinner, I thought of how interesting it would be to go to a dinner at Norman Rockwell’s house, as we ate our own lovely meal followed by an evening where we all lay, full and happy in the living room watching our favorite holiday movies, planning our Black Friday shopping “route” and eating perfectly tender slices of pumpkin pie topped with a twisty, curly dollop of whipped cream and the slightest dusting of cinnamon.
What are your favorite Thanksgiving memories?
A Mama, Baby & Shar-pei in the Kitchen 