JUST ANOTHER DAY TO WATCH FOOTBALL!

It’s Thanksgiving week.  Traditionally families take the day off (sometimes the weekend or the entire week), travel hundreds of miles to visit family, and sit down to a meal and give thanks.  Then they retire to the living room and watch football.

Today I am remembering the early days of family Thanksgivings that were filled with members of our colorful family and jokes and stories abounded.  When my grandparents were able to be there I remember there being a lot more alcohol, not that they were heavy drinkers, but it was just more socially acceptable to have a few cocktails during the food preparation and ingestion.  My sister, Kathy and I would try to sneak and be the first to steal the golden brown skin off the breast of the turkey.  My sister, Joann, would find my great aunt Winnie and get a taste of her “drink” and I am not sure, but maybe even a puff from her cigarette.  I honestly do not remember what my oldest sister, Georgette, would do.  I am sure if she reads this she will enlighten me.  But me?  I used to listen to all the stories.  I was quite young, and in the Jersey-based family setting it was still common to hear the phrase: Little children should be seen and not heard.  So I listened.  (I) listened to incredible stories of the “old” days, believing every one of them but now not knowing if any were true.

I started this off with the premise that it all turned to football, but in the very early years there was not a whole lot of television watching.  We had one.  Our extended families had them, but it was more about being together.  The celebrations, however, were not openly about giving thanks.  It was about family.  In fact it is now years later and I can finally give those “thanksgivings” the consideration they deserve.

As years passed and family members passed the traditions changed.  My parents moved us out west to Arizona far from our core family.  We continued to celebrate Thanksgiving, but it was different.  I can’t explain just how different it was, but it is as though the foundation of family had shaken loose and we were an island that had broken free, adrift, alone.  We still practiced a lot of the same traditions, but they were considerably different.  There was a sense that our break from our roots was a progressive thing that would continue into the following generations.  And it has.  Family has been created and then dropped at different points across the country, like dropping an apple core out the window only to find a sole apple tree standing there years later.  Football has replaced family stories, and there may or may not be the obligatory phone call to or from the kids.  Still?  I am thankful.  When I sit down to dinner this Thursday my wife and I will, each in our own way, give thanks.  Thanks for the Day, the past year, the past decades, and for the memories of those smiles we are no longer able to see.

And perhaps…Perhaps…we will skype a call to our children to see their smiles that are still there to see.  I know it will be a blessing to us, and through the ages, it will also be a blessing to them after we too have passed.