I remember my childhood Thanksgivings very fondly. For 15 years, I got to spend Thanksgiving Day at my great-grandmother's house surrounded by the love of extended family.
I remember sitting in my great-grandmother's living room watching Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with the smells of dinner wafting from the kitchen. Great aunts, great uncles and distant cousins gathered with us for dinner.
My Great Uncle Bobby used to warn the family to get their servings of mashed potatoes before I got to the bowl. To this day, I've yet to have mashed potatoes as good as my great-grandma's.
Following my great-grandmother's death, Thanksgivings were spent visiting my sister who lived in Auburn, Alabama at the time. Our big family gatherings had fallen to a party of four, occasionally five when my grandmother would travel along with us.
Thanksgiving in the South was very different. The first year, my mom went on a frantic hunt to find ingredients for stuffing, only to discover it was hard to come by because it's a southern custom to deep fry their turkeys. My mom quickly learned the lesson and bought all of her ingredients prior to leaving Maryland.
Of course, the weather was different as well. My sister and our dad waxed their cars outside while wearing shorts on Thanksgiving Day. We often took advantage of the warmer weather by escaping during Black Friday. We headed up I-85 for day trips to Stone Mountain, Warm Springs and Plains.
Over the years, our Thanksgiving family gatherings have become smaller. The many generations before me that I sat around the table with as a child have passed. My grandmother has since been moved into a nursing home and my sister has begun to celebrate holidays outside of our family.
Thanksgiving is now celebrated by just myself and my parents. Though my mom puts so much effort and diligence into the holiday dinner, the only difference between Thanksgiving and any other dinner of the year is the amount of food I eat. Particularly since I'm vegetarian, my mom's efforts always seem to be excessive.
Since I live only an hour and a half from my parents, family dinners on a Thursday occur very often throughout the year. Thanksgiving seems like just another day to me. By all means, I'm not wishing for less time spent with my parents, but the day as certainly lost its magic.
Perhaps one day the size of the group around the dinner table will grow and bring back some of that magic. But in the meantime, I'll focus not on the amount of people around the table or the amount of food that's on it, but the amount of love surrounding it.
