But now I have to come down to earth and face the cold hard truth. I'm going to have to clean my freakin' house in anticipation of a big family dinner. Let's just say the housework has been a bit neglected and a serious holiday cleaning is in order. Yikes. It will take me days. I better get crackin'.
I'm sure it is hard for readers outside the U.S. to understand Thanksgiving, unless you are Canadian. Then you have already been through yours and you know the drill. But the rest are probably wondering what's the big deal with this Thanksgiving thing, and why don't we just wait until Christmas for Turkey? I don't know. We just don't. We're American, for better or worse.
Thanksgiving is a family-based holiday, but not commercialized or decadent like the U.S. version of Christmas has become. It is about food, memories, and love. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. I bet a lot of the people who will celebrate on Thursday dread it like the plague because they will have to sit next to their mean-spirited aunt, or their racist father. Politics, religion, and unresolved emotional themes will ruin yet another family meal in some households. Oh well, as long as the food is good. It is really the best meal of the year.
I love Thanksgiving food. Thinking of mashed potatoes and turkey gravy, moist cornbread stuffing with nuts and dried fruit, homemade cranberry sauce, and all the rest make me happy. A special memory is my mother's pumpkin pie. Oh, Ma! I miss you so.
She never bought canned pumpkin. Nope, not my Mom. She bought small pie pumpkins, split them in half, cleaned out the seeds and baked the pumpkin in the oven before scraping it out and making the pie. THEE pie. The perfect pumpkin pie. It was totally different than one made with canned pumpkin. Hers was luscious; darker, complex, textured, better in every way.
Everything was usually made from scratch in her house, but certainly always on holidays. She would even make homemade bread for Thanksgiving. We topped it off with jellies and jams her and my father "put up" (i.e., canned) every August.
I have had dreams about her three times in the past two weeks. In truth, this is what the holidays really do. They conjure up ghosts.
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| My mother in pink, 1988 |
Ah yes, they do conjure up ghosts. Been thinking a lot about days past, Thanksgiving's past. And when the weather this morning said we were in for the coldest Thanksgiving in over 100 years my mind immediately went to a cold childhood Thanksgiving Day when the snowflakes began to fall. Have a happy Thanksgiving. I'll be right with you with the cleaning today.
ReplyDeleteLovely comment, mxtodis123! Now I'm also remembering cold and snowy Thanksgivings from the past. Hope your cleaning isn't as major as mine.
DeleteYour mom looks happy in the photo. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
ReplyDeleteShe was very happy that day. I hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful, too.
DeleteNo you do not! Why clean when all those people are just going to mess it all up again? Our general rule when having a lot of guests is to clean the bathroom and vacuum the pet hair off sitting surfaces. Done. Now enjoy your guests and food and memories. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant! Going to clean the bathrooms now. I can vacuum tomorrow.
DeleteA perfect day. I am in love with two dishes straight from oven to table, and also with the bearded fellow downsizing the bowel of baked beans. A happy day.
ReplyDeleteIntriguing...
DeleteMy Lord! You look like your offspring! I am astounded. But of course the vision of each other we have in our memories is idealized and much cherished. I just didn't know how much physically you have in common. Silly me. You think I would have noticed. Nope. Too busy having fun we were.
ReplyDeleteYou realize I am the one in the blue shirt next to my mother, right? T has his arm around M here.
DeleteOh, how I miss my grandma's homemade cornbread dressing and giblet gravy. And her biscuits, baked macaroni and cheese, and roast turkey were all fantastic, too.
ReplyDeleteI agree that cleaning up before a big family meal is a waste...as someone else said, wipe down the bathroom, vacuum up the pet hair, and save the big cleaning for after the guests all go home!
These holidays evoke such great memories.
DeleteEven if you tell yourself that you don't - you will clean your house. It's programmed into our being and let's not pretend otherwise. Enjoy it though. And have a wonderful time afterwards.
ReplyDeleteHa, I feel like I must fight this programming. But a dirty house is so humiliating when company arrives.
DeleteDuring our six-year stay in the USA we were the subject of much generous hospitality. Within less than a year we'd been invited to more neighbourly "dos" than in the whole of our - then - five years of marriage in London. But then London is the second least hospitable city on earth, after Paris.
ReplyDeleteYou will be familiar with the role the Fool plays in several Shakespeare plays - a social oddity, given to word games, teaching and teasing. That was me. It seemed to work because we were invited back and virtually the whole office turned up when we - greatly daring - organised our own "do". In retrospect I get the feeling that wife and daughter (later another baby daughter) were probably the greater attraction.
But never to Thanksgiving and I think we understood why. Thanksgiving is essentially a family affair and for once in the year the ever-open-armed Americans reckoned they could get along without a Fool. Since I had a secret antipathy towards sweet potatoes, pumpkin and any kind of squash that was fine by me. Later still I'm glad it happened that way and this is crystallised in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles. All very funny but perhaps because the plot is bound together by that special urge Americans experience in late November.
But all that cleaning up..... Had I ever been invited I'd have turned up late so that I wasn't the first to muss up the rug.
Love the last sentence. And no, that doesn't mean I don't like the rest of your comments.
DeleteI like the idea of cleaning bathrooms and vacuuming up the doggie fur. That should do it! I love seeing that photo. It captures the spirit of the holiday so well. And even though we have never met, I knew which one was you in the photo. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Robin. I'll be thinking of you tomorrow knowing it will be your first Thanksgiving without your mother to call or be with.
DeleteThank you for that, Colette. It's a sad first Thanksgiving without her. We didn't often get to spend it with her over the years, but she was always at my sister's Thanksgiving table, the center of attention in the very best way.
DeleteI finally made it back here to put on my glasses and look at the photo. Sad to say, I missed you entirely the first time! But you can blame the eye surgeon who insisted a) I needed to be far-sighted after cataract surgery and myself who b) hates wearing magnifiers to read and distance glass to drive. What happened to my eyes?! Oh, yes, old age. Anyway, I found you finally. Sorry!
ReplyDeleteNot a problem. I was momentarily delighted that you could imagine I looked like my beautiful daughter. :)
DeleteWell, you do look like her. Just not that much. I checked after I found my reading magnifiers.
ReplyDelete