In a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when we know we’ve already planned to take a slice of both. Some of us will be missing this year because of in-law dinners and lives too many states away, but a small group will sit and celebrate the sacred family tradition that is Thanksgiving.
We will start that meal with a prayer, like we always do, and the four-year-old will grin into my face, because he’s so excited his Nonny and Poppy are here; and the five-year-old will try hard to close his eyes but won’t be able to help that roving gaze, because he’s always loved a food spread like this; and the eight-year-old will shift from foot to foot, because his daddy sometimes prays a little too long.
And we will give thanks in our hearts for all we have seen and done in the year stretching between this moment and the last time we all met around a table and a turkey and two pans of green bean casserole.
Love and hope and awe and wonder meet us here.
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It’s hard to know when those first memories of Thanksgiving began. There are flashes of days down through the years, one at a great-uncle’s house with woods looming behind it and a long wooden swing hanging from the trees that shadowed his yard and pine needles thick like a spiky carpet on the ground.
There is a great-great grandmother’s house, all of us squeezed in the tiny square footage her husband built, where legend had it she slept with a gun under her pillow because she lived alone and the neighborhood had turned a little dangerous for an old woman and she wasn’t the least afraid to use it, and I remember the way the kids would sit out on her cement porch and swing or drop pieces of paper or leaves through the little mail slot so it would fall in the middle of her living room, reminding the adults we were still waiting on that food-call.
There is a great-grandmother’s house, after the great-great and the great-uncle were gone, and this gathering looked and felt smaller because so many of the older ones had died, and others had drifted away with the dying, and it was only a handful of kids who went out front to play kickball while the adults and my Nana watched a game on her living room television. All the kids missed the false teeth flying out when a referee made a bad call and Nana screeched at the screen, but we heard the laughter of all the adults who witnessed it.
These early memories are raucous and full of children running in and out of houses, trying not to stick fingers in the pies, and I can still smell that turkey and the fresh bread and those vegetables we didn’t even know the names of.
I couldn’t explain it then, not in words, but I could feel the thanks that burst from the first bite of food, all the way to the last bite of pie, when we all felt like we might pop and surely wouldn’t eat again after this.
There was something simple and special and sacred about those shared days. They courted joy.
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Thanksgiving Day has lost some of its magic now.
Maybe it’s because a job demands work until the very day of thanks. Maybe it’s because kids go to school and homework still comes home and schedules still remain the same until Thursday rolls around. Maybe it’s because of all who are missing now.
When all those greats were alive we had so many families gathering around so many tables, and now, this year, we have two. There are no more greats around for the little children. Those children’s parents are the ones hosting dinners now. There aren’t even always aunts and uncles who join in the festivities anymore, because we all have our own lives and our own plans and our own families.
Gone are the days of great aunts and uncles all under the same roof for the same day breaking bread and eating their fill and trying not to notice how everyone looks older this year.
I feel a little sad about this. We used to pack a house on this traditional holiday, and now that holiday demands work and dangles big sales and asks families to cut short the one day a year when they might fall asleep on a couch after eating too much turkey and no one would mind their snoring.
I miss that magic.
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There is a Thanksgiving that stands out as scary and new and somewhat disappointing. I was nine years old, and we had just moved to Ohio because it was the only way my mom thought we would ever be a family again, since my dad worked in Ohio and our home state of Texas was a long way off. She told us the news a month before summer ended and listened to us cry about leaving our friends, and then she packed us up and we moved into a two-story house in Mansfield, six or so rundown blocks from an elementary school.
We didn’t have the money that year to go back home (Texas would always be home) and spend the holiday with my mom’s family, who held all my memories of Thanksgiving to date. So we spent the day with my dad’s family instead.
My paternal grandmother was a saintly woman. It wasn’t her fault that she and my grandfather were the only two I really knew in that group of thirty or so. It wasn’t her fault that I had never felt more like an outsider than I did that year. That day.
Cousins who had grown up together, whose names we didn’t even know and I can’t recall today, played hide and seek in Grandma’s travel trailer, and my brother and sister and I stayed out under the trees, raking leaves, because we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and raking leaves at least gave us something to do. So we raked and waited for that screen door to open and let us know it was time to eat and we could finally blame our silence on food.
When they called, we all trampled inside a house that smelled like cabbage.
It was the first time I ever threw up after a Thanksgiving meal.
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I wonder what my boys will remember of Thanksgiving, this holiday that is not so wild and noisy and crowded as it was in my girlhood because there is only them and a grandma and grandpa and, every other year, an aunt and uncle or two who bring a handful of cousins.
Will they remember these Thanksgiving days as thrilling, with a haze of laughter blurring them into gold? Will they remember adults playing board games and talking until the sun goes down and the whole sky turns dark? Will they remember how eagerly they waited to sit at the “adult” table, wondering every year if this one might be the year they move up past all the babies?
The spread at our Thanksgiving is nothing like it was for me as a kid, with rows and rows of homemade pies and sweet tea like syrup and a whole table full of steaming food in too-hot-to-touch bowls, but does it still look magical to my sons? Do they feel the people who are missing, all those family members who have come and long gone, or do they see a room-for-more house as full?
Do they notice the lost pieces like I do?
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Then there was the first Thanksgiving without my maternal grandmother.
She had been there for all of the holidays I could remember but one, short and regal with black and white curls, always quiet in a corner chair so she could observe her family, because she was content simply to be in the same room with all of them.
She died in early February the year I only had one baby, and no one was thinking of Thanksgiving the day we gathered inside a church and mourned our great loss in gushing sobs until we had headaches and swollen eyes and a whole pile of crumpled tissues stuffed in the bottom of our purses.
No one thought of Thanksgiving when it came around, either. It came and went, without my aunts and uncles or any of the people left who might have carried on this sacred tradition of Thanksgiving Dinner. We didn’t carry on.
That year I hosted a small family gathering at my house, where my brother and sister and mom and stepdad and husband and only one baby boy sat down at a table set for six, with a highchair hanging on the end. It was the smallest family gathering we’d ever seen for Thanksgiving, because the one who held all the rest of us together was gone.
I didn’t know then that it would become the new standard for a family with a missing piece.
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How much do we lose in this place of smaller family gatherings? I don’t really know.
As much as I grieve my family’s loss of larger gatherings, I cannot separate myself from something else I have learned in my adult years, something I never had to know as a child. In our world, there exist those with no family left and those who can’t physically travel to their family and those who have long been rejected by their family, and what about these on a day like this?
There are those who don’t eat half as well as we do on Thanksgiving, or any other day, and what about them? How do we even celebrate family around the abundant spread of a table when there are those who are lost and hungry and alone?
Maybe the answer to those spaces left in our home by the ones who are gone waits right outside our doors, at the house beside ours or the one behind the park or the street corner down the way, where the man selling newspapers works just another day of his life. Maybe we become family for those who have none.
My table will be full for Thanksgiving this year, but there is room still for more. I want to find them. I want to know them. I want to bring them home, into the fold of light and love and laughter like I have known.
It’s Thanksgiving, and we will eat and we will reminisce and we will give thanks for all we have and the people we love and the whole last year’s beauty. But that is not The End of Thanksgiving. Because true Thanksgiving becomes thanks-living, and thanks-living means thanks-giving to the world, to all those who need what we have, be it food or presence or simply an invitation.
So this Thanksgiving, I see the hollows and the spaces, and I thank God for them, because, even now, they are waiting to be filled.
Someone is waiting to be filled.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash)
