The Holiday Season Commences!

No matter how hard we try to deny it, the "holiday season" in this country seems to begin at Thanksgiving Day and proceeds through into the New Year.  I have no issue with this.  I have no issues with fabric and craft stores offering their holiday materials starting in July.  I make something for each and every one of my loved ones every year, so I know that you can't plan on shopping 2 days before Christmas if you plan on crafting or sewing several projects.  I do, however, have a mental seize-up hearing all the holiday crap as early as September or October.  I know it isn't patriotic to despise the blatant pleas for us to rush out in the middle of the night to spend money so THEY are in the black for the year.  Not one of  THEM is all that concerned about the state of my finances and how much red is showing in my quiet little world.

Cliché Thanksgiving Day gatherings tend to involve massive quantities of wonderful food and hordes of family and friends attending to the dispatch of these comforting goodies.  Reality, however, compels many of us to have to be on hand to work on the following day (see above) so that these folks are unable to travel any distance at all to be a part of the celebration.  Distance of the sort that involves double digit hours of driving makes gathering together even more difficult.  Another challenge involves spending 'quality time' with all the branches and twigs on your family shrub, if at all possible.  Adulthood and blending families make this a common problem.

My incredibly clever and inventive nephew, Kelly, and his equally industrious wife, Kara, have come up with a very workable solution to that last challenge.  They have named it the "All-Family Thanksgiving Dinner" and each of the four years it has been in existence has made us realize what a wonderful idea it is!  The concept was based on the fact that it was not very enjoyable to try to plan which course of the meal to eat with whom and how long you could expect the next group you were going to see to tolerate your tardiness....again.  We all KNOW about 'those' people. You know the ones.  We mutter about them as we do the dishes as they are in the process of dirtying more!  Their solution was to include (yup, you got it) ALL the families, in-laws, outlaws, friends...anyone that we know may be spending the holiday alone or far from their own families  I know it sounds simple, but most of us don't really do it.

Tradition tells us that the first "Thanksgiving" dinner involved everyone in the village, as well as the native tribes from the surrounding area.  What Kelly and Kara planned wasn't far from that.  They reserved the Knights of Columbus Hall in Watertown. They invited all 'sides' of everyone's families to be a part.  They asked each of us to contribute names and addresses of our own family members and sent out lovely flyers telling where, when and what to bring.  They simply wanted an RSVP so they knew how much food to cook.  That isn't much to ask!

Kelly and Kara fix the turkey and the ham in those lovely electric roasters. It is all carved and ready to eat when we get there. Kara's mom actually makes REAL gravy from the drippings!  (There really ought to be some law against fake gravy from packets...there are laws about everything else!)  For the last 3 years, we have contributed potatoes from our garden, though I still am not pleased with the texture when they have to sit for very long.  With all the wonderful contributions, there are salads, veggies (both cold and hot), and desserts to choose from.  No one should go away hungry! Last year, someone brought a bag of potato chips.  Checking back later, we became aware that no one knew who that person was! After a little consideration, we realized that it really didn't matter if any of us knew him; what mattered was that he wasn't spending this particular Thanksgiving alone! We talked about having name tags, but realized that we would not only want to know the person's name but also who he or she "belongs to" and that that would sometimes involve a very large tag!

After the dinner has been consumed, folks join in to help clean up and then we seem to be forming a tradition of playing bingo....after all, the bingo cards are already there, right??  Again Kelly and Kara are so very organized that they have an assortment of prizes, tagged for either adults or kids, ready and waiting for each winner to choose from.

As we prepared to eat dinner, we looked around at the group (it has grown from about 45 the first year to almost 70 this year) and realized that many of the folks there were people we had actually met at the first gathering...and hadn't seen anywhere other than at Thanksgiving.  We also realized that it was very good to see them again! I have no way of adequately thanking my clever nephew and his wife for the wonderful idea they had....except to hope that they keep on planning this wonderful event.