Just My Thanksgiving

So....my mother has passed. My follow up quip is that "I hate to say I have lost my mother, as I know where she is. She is in a canister on a shelf in my brother's garage."

As I type that it really seems not funny. Thanksgiving was one of her holidays. I don't know what happened to them, but she had a cache of 30 year old (at the time)Hallmark cut outs of cute Pilgrims and Indians. Then over the years, she added Indian corn, a conrucopia, and other festivus effluvia of the season. Since her death, if my sister was not with us, my husband and I have been graciously adopted by friends. My husband was raised in a family where Thanksgiving was huge. The two of us are lost this time of year without our birth families.

I can still feel how Thanksgiving day started at my mom's house. As with all of the memories in our pudgy household, it starts with food. Bacon, fried potatoes and eggs. Eaten while watching the parade, mom loved the bands. THEN the stuffing had to be made. Call it what you will, but my mom had control issues. For years she would "teach" me to cook and part of that wisened tutealage was creating the base for the stuffing. I close my eyes and can still FEEL the small blackened cast iron frying pan (older than myself) where I would put a cube of butter, a chopped onion, leftover bacon, and celery. Added to that, I would sprinkle in (only under mom's expert eye) poultry seasoning & paprika. That is how our day started. What a joy!

Over the years, mom got creative with the turkey. NEVER with the dressing. We had standard side dishes, and of course pies. My sister and I faithfully recalled this year how my mother would scare everyone away from the food, yet it was HER who would take a tiny slice of pumpkin pie to taste it. The awesome maternal part was her feigned indignance at being caught. The regal distaste was stunning. How dare we question that she had the right to taste her pies. I think later in life she just said "I don't give a shit what you think, I wanted a piece". To her credit, that bravado had nothing to do with the cancer, I think she just wanted what she wanted.

The hilarious part of this holiday is that mom was/is Canadian! Yes, the Canadians do have Thanksgiving...though I do doubt that Alexander MacKenzie stopped in his explorations to share maize and pheasant with locals as he searched to plunder the North in search of the Northwest passage for his employer. But I digress. This young, new wife arrives in America and somewhat soon after is abandoned in Navy housing as the brash brave husband goes to war. My mother claimed that she learned how to cook from the other Navy wives in the complex in Hawaii. I can also imagine that women in California helped the funny, petite and engaging new arrival in the neighborhood.

So my mom really did kind of embody what Thanksgiving originally is attempted to be replicated after...new arrivals, in a new area, without comforts of home, learning from the people who were there already. Now my mother was not a Puritan, nor did she encounter dysentry, or spread small pox over the Bay area, but she was definitely pioneering with all of the other wives who were alone together. Before my mom is canonized, I know she learned quite a bit with either a bottle of wine or a rum and coke in her hand....definitely housewarming.

With my sister, we became adept with mom at whipping through the list of Thanksgiving tasks. The end of the day is the meal. I think my mom sat down to most dinners last and motioning everyone to go ahead and eat. But mom being mom, would load up her plate and eat....nothing. Yup...nothing. Can't say why, but she would just not be interested in eating what she slaved over. The meal was NOT the event, the event was the day...the preparations, the traditions, and most assuredly the finely pressed linens! But never the food!

There was the Thanksgiving where mom put the cooked turkey out one the porch to get out of her miniscule kitchen so she could finish. What was happening as we continued with the meal was my brother's two lab puppies were eating as much as they could before they were caught. As my brother and his wife drove home, whining and a horrible smell eminated from the back of the truck. When they had stopped, they noticed the results of the rich meat which had ravaged the pup's systems. We laugh about that. Then there was one of mom's last Thanksgivings where we were told to turn the turkey over 2 hours into the cooking. This was my brother's first adult situation with my mom's turkey creativity. He looked at the 25 pound bird which had been in a hot oven and wanted to know how to turn the "fucker" over. Hiding in the kitchen, the three of us offered a fairly adept yet overly dramatic interpretation of the turkey turning with mom being NONE the wiser that the bird hadn't moved.

So, we sat with our adopted family over this Thanksgiving offering them thanks for including them into their stories, traditions and holiday! Yet still being reminded that ALL families are full of the same stories, siblings and food!

Be good to you!
H