Thanksgiving

thanksgiving-crop

As this goes live, Thanksgiving is mostly memories, with some still-dirty dishes and a fridge crammed with leftovers as reminders.  But here at J P Manor, holiday festivities are coming at a breakneck pace this year.  The result is that blogging time is being taken over by baking time and house cleaning time and get-together-with-family time.  So this year I have decided to re-run this post from Thanksgiving weekend of 2016.  Holiday memories are evergreen, and so (I hope) is this essay about memories of some Thanksgiving weekends of my youth.

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The holidays are looming.  While some of the younger folks kick things off with Halloween, I am of a more traditional bent and prefer to begin my holiday season with Thanksgiving.  Let’s call Halloween a holiday appetizer.

I am stressed as we head into the home stretch before the Big T.  Gobs to do at work, and having committed to have a thanksgiving dinner at our house, there is much to do there as well.  Fortunately, memories of many years ago help to keep me calm in this season.  All of the craziness of the current year sort of oozes into the background when the word “Thanksgiving” begins the process of mental associations in my brain.

My father grew up on the east coast, and his father came from Massachusetts, the heart of old New England.  Thanksgiving traditions ran deep in Dad’s family and the holidays I remember most are those Thanksgivings spent in the suburbs of Philadelphia during my youth.

A kid’s holiday is always more of an adventure when it involves a trip, and Philly was about six hundred miles from my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana.  We made the trip several times and in several ways.  We flew a couple of times, but for some reason, those trips are the least memorable.

I remember the drives, like the time around 1975 Dad swapped cars with a business partner for the weekend and we had a ’74 Lincoln Continental Town Car to drive out.  This was the year that I had gotten my drivers’ permit and was given a nighttime turn in the widest car I had ever driven.  It did not help that this drive was also on the old Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was the narrowest four lane highway I had ever navigated.  The mixture of these two (with your father at your right elbow) is called stress.

More pleasant travel memories come from the trips we took by train.  Passenger train travel was in serious decline in the 1960s, but we made use of it two or three times when I was young.  I am probably one of the youngest people alive who can recall boarding a passenger car shortly after the early darkness of late November and spending the night in a sleeper car.  “Don’t flush the toilet while we are in the station” was a parental warning I still remember.  I didn’t really understand then that the plumbing in those old railcars flushed directly onto the tracks, but boy do I now.  Yuck.

Dinner in the dining car was fun, watching the drinks on the table shake to the bumps of the tracks.  After our meal, we would return to our compartment to find that it had magically been turned from seats into beds.  Soon after, we would turn in for the night.

I have never forgotten the rhythmic “ka dunk  ka dunk . . . . . . . ka dunk ka dunk” of the massive steel wheels rolling over the seams in the rails.  Every once in awhile, the rhythm would be punctuated by a couple of “ka BANG”s as we crossed a couple of badly misaligned rails.  From the ground, those rails look so smooth, but when you are riding on the train the side to side swaying and lurching tells you that it isn’t so.  It always made me wonder how long ago those rails had been set and the spikes pounded.

It was on one of these trips that I was unable to fall asleep and had “the conversation” with my father, somewhere in Ohio.  No, not that one.  The one where I found out that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, and thus was I ushered into “The Club”.  That night I became one of people who understood everything there was to know about life.  Or so it seemed at the time.

The next morning brought breakfast and a few more hours of travel before we finally arrived at our destination.  Paoli Station was usually the place where my grandfather would be waiting to pick us up in his big white 1962 Cadillac.  I have never forgotten the black and white interior with the huge Cadillac crests on the rubber floor mats.  Until I got too big, my favorite seat in that car was on the wide folded-down armrest in the middle of the back seat, which made me as tall as everyone else in the car.

The rest of the weekend would be blur of activity, much of it involving playing with cousins that we seldom saw other than on these trips.  It was a world very different from the one I inhabited from day to day, in big ways and small.  Before-dinner cocktails while domestic help finished up with the cooking was not my normal.  And why did everyone call it “soda” instead of pop?

The thanksgiving dinner itself was always everything it should be.  It makes me happy that what makes a first-rate thanksgiving dinner is one of the few things that enjoy something approaching universality in our fractious modern society.  Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes,  cranberries in some form, big soft yeast rolls and pumpkin pie.  Everyone does them differently and everyone may add or subtract a dish here or there, but the classics are evergreen and ever delightful.  As for dessert, my grandmother always preferred lemon meringue pie to pumpkin, a taste I have carried on to the present.

These weekends were always over way too soon, and it is funny that I don’t remember as much about the goodbyes and the travel home.  And isn’t it also funny how the mind can keep alive a long-gone place and time, allowing you to go back to it over and over.

But back to the present, as there is much to do.  There will be no travel this year, no  Cadillac and certainly no domestic help in the kitchen.  What there will be is family coming together over a big traditional turkey dinner in a way that will hopefully create a good time and place in the mental storage banks, whether in my own or in those of others in the family.  And perhaps a before-dinner cocktail as well.

17 thoughts on “Thanksgiving”

  1. Wonderful description of the train trip, J P. I can hear the sound of those rails just by reading your words. Kudos for zero mention of Christmas (other than “the talk”). So many of us lump Thanksgiving into the “year-end holidays” instead of giving the day its own due. Your Thanksgivings with extended family mirror my own. I’m guessing you sat at a “kids table” a time or two (not a fond memory). Also, the image you led with is almost as descriptive as your personal account. I love the look of the apron over the dress, the bow ties, and how the men would rather drink than lift a finger while the women fuss over the table. Norman Rockwell?

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    • I forget where I found that image, and you made me search it out. It was from a 1950’s advertisement by the American Brewers Association, and credits the artwork to John Gannam, from a series he called Home Life In America. And I agree with you that Christmas needs to stay in its lane, which does not begin until the beginning of December!

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  2. The post is well worth a re-run just as Thanksgiving reruns and leftovers are traditional even as times change. My oldest son and his wife did not attend our dinner this year because they are in the mountains skiing. Our middle son was on the beach in El Salvador with his family visiting relatives of our daughter-in-law. Luckily we have a third son, so his family celebrated with us. We cannot keep up with who is a vegetarian, vegan, or on some other specific diet. But we are able to serve dinner earlier now that we can cook a much smaller turkey!

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  4. An excellent recollection of childhood Thanksgiving travel. For whatever reason, it seems that Thanksgiving is the holiday that always has seemed to involve the most travel. Tropes about “over the river and through the woods” aside. I always recall either a car trip to get to relatives, or relatives taking car trips to our house for Thanksgiving in particular.

    Your recollection about memorable train travel strikes a chord too. Like you, my life only briefly touched the era of long distance train travel; but my memories of it are the same. My family traveled from Washington, DC to St. Louis in October, 1965 (I know the date since our objective was to attend the setting of the keystone ceremony for the Gateway Arch…which was 10/28/1965). I was only 4.5, but the memory of the sleeper compartment, the Pullman porters who handled our luggage and basically were the facilitators of the trip (yes, they still existed in 1965), the dining car meals, and walking in my sock-feet down the length of the train from the movie car (they had one!) to our sleeping compartment is vivid.

    I have a lifelong love of long-distance passenger train travel, and have taken a number of long distance Amtrak trips over the years since 1965…but nothing has compared to the pre-Amtrak level of service and the amazing feeling of doing that as a little kid.

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    • I agree that modern train travel is not the same thing. Our trips were on the old Pennsylvania Railroad. Even now I have a deck of Pennsylvania Railroad playing cards, which are still in their luxurious felt-encased box! a couple of later trips after the merger that created the Penn Central seemed a little less magical, but I was a little older too, which makes most things less magical.

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  6. I enjoyed this tale of your youth and the Thanksgiving holiday JP. I have always been envious of those who gather with extended families for big holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving or even family reunions – that is because I now have no family members at all and growing up, it was just my parents and maternal grandparents … it did not make for large holiday get-togethers. My grandmother was one of nine kids growing up on a farm, so when they all grew up and moved away from home, they brought their families back for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mom would tell me about meeting and playing with all her cousins as children, but they were scattered hither and yon and they never connected again as adults. I have been on a train trip but only during the day and never in a sleeper car which sounds like an adventure. I often see those trips for viewing the Fall foliage in New England by rail where you eat, sleep and view the foliage all from the train and it sounds like a fabulous trip.

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    • Our gatherings seem small now compared to those I attended with Marianne’s family in the early days of our getting together. Marianne is one of 5 and her mother’s sister had 9 kids, so those gatherings were absolutely huge.

      I knew a guy who used to describe himself as the only child of two only children, so he had a tiny family, until his parents died, and then it was just him. But his wife was one of something like 8 or 10 kids, so he picked up a big extended family by getting married.

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      • Huge gatherings would be a good chance to keep in touch with everyone. It must have felt very strange for the guy to go from such a tiny family to a large extended family – he would hope they wore nametags until he got their names memorized.

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  7. I enjoyed your trip down memory lane!

    In Canada we celebrate Thanksgiving in October. Our food and traditions are similar, but where we used to be the one to host a meal for 16-20 people, now it is often just The Car Guy and I. Immediate family has either moved far away, or they take advantage of the week-end to travel somewhere. This year we are in AZ for American Thanksgiving and it was just The Car Guy and I again. But we chatted with all our neighbours ‘over the fence’ sometime during the day; and had Facetime Chats with some family and texted others. It was a delightful day! And cooking for two is really easy.

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      • By words and actions, we have removed ‘traditional’ and ‘guilt if we don’t’ from our family vocabulary. We have had Christmas in July when that was when we were all able to gather! We have asked, and answered – how do we celebrate the gift of being a family without attaching a chaos that can be exhausting and unduly expensive in cost and time)?

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