It's Thanksgiving

It’s getting dark outside.  The traffic began backing up at about noon today.  The day before Thanksgiving in the US is almost not a workday.  The phones don’t ring very often.  The email slows down and everyone seems to have a picture of roast turkey in their heads.  I will not be at the 6am door buster sale on Thursday morning.  It’s Thanksgiving, isn’t it?  “Black Friday” used to be the shopping day but now “Turkey Thursday” has become fair game for the merchants.  This used to a family holiday.  Now the commentators are all making jokes about the inevitable family squabbles when we all get together.  I’m sure it happens sometimes but it’s not what I remember.  My parents and grandparents are gone now but I can picture them very clearly in my mind.  We moved every year for a long time while I was growing up, but no matter where we were, we made the trip back to the farm.  It was a real homecoming. It was not a huge family gathering but with aunts and uncles and cousins and eventually grandchildren, we could put 20 or 25 people at a couple of big tables and one little one for the smallest of us.  It was a grand feast, making the side dishes while the turkey baked.  There was always a big discussion about how long to cook the bird.  It was always a difference of opinion but somehow it inevitably came out fine. Early on (read, many years ago) the Detroit Lions were the only professional football team that would play on Thanksgiving Day and they to work to find an opponent.  The dessert was planned for about the middle of the first quarter (I can’t wait to blog about Grandma’s pies, yum, yum).  Nothing much ever happened in the game until after that. Then maybe we would go outside at half-time and throw the ball around, "while the women talked". (Boy, will I hear about that remark!) The day dripped with tradition and it was really something to look forward to.  Maybe we’d even get a few flakes of snow or, even a snowstorm every few years. But it was just us.  All together. Enjoying each other’s company. There was love in the house. And it was a very American holiday. Purely American in fact.  It was Abraham Lincoln who made it so, during the Civil War yet. I like Thanksgiving.  I hope we’re not losing it to another commercialization that only points us to a special savings event. I’m already missing the left-over turkey between two slices of Wonder Bread with a lot of mayonnaise on both sides. Wonder Bread is gone and television is so full of entertainment, that there is hardly any time left to talk. I hope we do though. I hope we spend Thanksgiving day with people we love. It should be more than an American holiday.  It should be celebrated the world over, while we all take the day off from whatever we’re fighting for and simply enjoy the day together. I don’t know why I wrote this except that I noticed it was getting dark and I started to think about tomorrow and making the drive home. Let’s make it a good day. Happy Thanksgiving.