Obviously this year is different.  While growing up, Thanksgiving was such a fun holiday. My mom would wake up early to put the turkey in the oven low and slow. She would also make pies. My favorite part of that was what she did with the leftover dough. She would roll the dough into several strips similar to a pretzel, coat them with cinnamon sugar and roll them into twists and bake them. There was always mashed potatoes, rolls, pickles and olives. Her gravy was magical. We never ate breakfast or lunch on Thanksgiving day. Those cinnamon twists were our wonderful snack before our 2:00 traditional meal time. Dad would bring out the holiday dishes and set the table per mom’s direction. He would make the eggnog for later. We boys would be tasked with household chores to keep us busy. We would eat more than we needed around our table. Good times. Never an argument or politics but it was almost always just my folks and the kids. Afterwards we would all help with the clean up and move to the living room couches to watch football. Most of us were in a food coma. An hour or two would go by and we all inched towards the kitchen, mostly for the pies. My mom made three things every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Those were pumpkin pie, minced meat pie and scratch made cranberry sauce.  Over the years other things were added or subtracted but those three were alway there. Traditions I still honor mostly to this day, except for the minced meat pie.  Minced meat pie was slashed.

Once I got married and my parents had passed my Thanksgiving traditions went to my new family. Every year we would go to Dan’s sister’s house where she puts on quite the smorgasbord. I started a tradition several years ago where I would send her a ham because she does not like turkey. Also, I wanted other options. The family is a Jewish and Christian mix. Usually his sister has around 25 people over. These have been really good new traditions for me and great experience despite the frequent political comments. Unfortunately the family is on both ends of the spectrum on that front. I do not engage.

2020. What a change! This year we will be scaling back big time. We are not having a family dinner. Covid-19 stopped that. So, what do we do? I decided I was going to create a super small scaled down version of many different Thanksgiving dishes that I’ve had between our two families over the years. Just the two of us. Instead of an entire turkey we’re just going to cook a breast. We will see how the rest of this goes.

Since March it has largely been the two of us all day and all night. A trust test of our love and friendship and it has been great. I am very thankful for that.

I miss my parents and I miss seeing my friends. I am thankful technology has made it possible to zoom, text and email. We try to stay in touch frequently but virtual communication does not take place of personal contact. We all long for better days. We long for a kinder, equitable, safer country. After all of this, I hope that we can learn to be better people, better Americans, and more compassionate.

I look forward with hope for that day.