DocAndersen
Thanksgiving is a North American tradition (harvest festival) the first week of October in Canada and the third week of November in the US. For the US celebration, it is this coming Thursday. Traditionally it is a time when families gather. When we live, in Ohio, and when we lived in Greenwood, we would wander down to see my folks in Bloomington, along with my sisters and all the kids and spouses. It is a 10 hour trip from Maryland, so we haven’t got to Indiana for Thanksgiving since moving East. But before we went to Bloomington for Thanksgiving, we used to go to Cambridge Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. Often there would snow on the ground and the next holiday in a child’s eye is the greatest, Christmas.
My grandmother (my mother’s mother) was a phenomenal cook. Everything was amazing and perfect. I remember all of us sitting around the dining room table. The Dining room of the house (built by my grandfather and great-grandfather) wasn’t big. The table stretched to form the kitchen all the way into the living room. The turkey was perfect. I remember helping that morning as the meal was prepared. We wandered by Racine on the way home, so I know it was when I was probably seven or eight years old. My cousins and sister were there as well, I remember them. My father’s parents lived in Wisconsin Dells when I was really little, and around the time we moved to Indiana they moved to Racine.
We would stop that year for a second Thanksgiving dinner before heading home to Indiana. The pictures today are from my folks house in 2000. This is the infamous year of the Yams. My mother always made Yams for the holiday. It was a tradition that really other than my mother and father nobody ate a lot of the years. In that year the twins decided they liked Yams and ate most of the tray of Yams. The next year my mother made more Yams, but the moment had been lost. The twins never again ate Yams. Funny I remember that, my mother, wife, sisters and the rest of the family remember that. We called it the year of the Yams. It has never returned.
