This is among my favorite holidays of the year. It is the simplest overall (despite the cooking), and the one that places greatest focus on the people who are closest to us.
The sheer busyness of the rest of the year makes gathering together a challenge. So, I give thanks for one holiday that is set aside to reconvene family and extended family. Thanksgiving is one of the last strongholds, in the U.S. at least, of undistracted family celebration and, in my experience, always produces special and unforgettable moments.
This year, after recalling our many blessings as a family, and then dining on foods contributed by everyone, we talked about Thanksgivings past. The dialogue centered around some funny and absurdly memorable moments.
As we exchanged recollections, my wife said something I will now long remember. As we spoke of the cost of the gift-giving Season officially now begun, she said that ” the greatest gifts we give each other and our children are not the toys and things, but all the special memories.”
This Thanksgiving is no exception.
There were a few such moments that will now be numbered among the classics for us:
- a moment in our kitchen when I came into it to find my wife covered head-to-toe with velvet cake mix, wild-eyed, and on the verge of screaming, with so many dishes on all the burners needing simultaneous tending ( now, that’s an act of love);
- my baby sister’s distress ( as cooking is not her favorite thing ) at discovering that my wife made a pasta dish ( innocently, out of habit) after being tasked at the 11th hour to make baked Ziti for the meal by her big sister. The moment in which she saw the stuffed shells produced a few remarkable facial expressions and expletives from her that will be recalled and replayed for the rest of our lives (all meant in good fun of course);
- our nephew’s genuine excitement as we pulled up in front of the house as he announced our arrival with such unbridled exuberance ( an announcement of which royalty would be jealous);
- my baby sister, later on, asking whether we had, “oh, by the way”, sampled her baked Ziti, ( implying we hadn’t, of course) given all the hard work she had put into making it ( a delicious dish I might add);
- reading my niece’s short story ( a very talented college-aged young woman with a gift for fiction writing in the macabre genre of vampires and werewolves);
- the amusingly heated debate between myself and my wife on whether pre-slicing the Turkey, before traveling from our home to my sister’s and, again, before everyone had arrived, would make it dry out more quickly (one of those small items that can stimulate disproportionately passionate debate); and,
- our lengthy, thoughtful conversation after dinner about the Thanksgivings of history, and the most amusing, dramatic, and unforgettable moments.
On the ride home, we talked about looking forward to the ritual of hanging ornaments on our tree, many of them made as gifts by my wife’s late Aunt. There are the ones dedicated to each of our children when they were very young, and the many richly storied decorations that will soon adorn the entire house. We discussed building a gingerbread house together with my daughter when she returns from college for the holiday in a few weeks, and doing the same with our nieces and nephews.
As my wise wife counsels, it’s the memories that matter, for truly, in the years to come, it will be tougher to recall the material gifts than the joy of all those quirky memories that warm us and make us glad in the lonely times, and on the gray days.
Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. ~Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal
Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. ~Jean de Boufflers
God gave us memories that we might have roses in December. ~J.M. Barrie, Courage, 1922
May your Holidays be makers of enduring and uplifting memory.
© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
The Harried Mystic 
Leave a Reply