I have seven decades of Thanksgiving under my belt, from “Gerber Turkey & Gravy” in a jar to a barnyard full of Butterballs. This year we’re playing it safe with take-away turkey dinners. Terry, who lives up a long dirt road, is doing the main meal. Her sister Kathryn and Kathryn’s daughter Emily, are on pie duty. Everyone gets an individually packaged pandemic plate, a masked muffled greeting, and it’s back to our chilly individual burrows.
Astute readers will note my name was not on that work list, but I have not always been a freeloader. A few times, when my parents were in their 80s, I supplied the whole feast, from boiled onions to pecan pie. OK, I bought the whole feast, guaranteed to serve 12, from a restaurant in Hampton–but it still counts. Last year, I was on my own with little more than a few leftover chicken fingers and a can of cranberry sauce.
Not every Thanksgiving looks like a Norman Rockwell painting or, thankfully, plays out like a scene from “Annie Hall.” And if 2020 isn’t a “real” Thanksgiving, we are wise to remember that, historically, the whole Pilgrims-and-Indians happy meal thing is a myth. But despite what did or did not happen in Plymouth in 1621, our Thanksgivings, yours and mine, are memorable, important, and powerful moments.
Holidays are about tradition. And tradition, according to Webster, is “the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation.” The food, the decorations, the cooking and cleaning up, the prayers and curses, the hugs and the leftovers are all customs. Each family has their own. Repeating them, year after year, is how we connect and measure our changing lives. How we repeat, revise, and revere those customs is what defines our family.
Exactly 40 years ago, back when I knew everything, I wrote about my family’s holiday for a local newspaper now long defunct. I was 29, a veteran of many Thanksgivings in the little brick house where my Aunt Dot and Uncle Karl lived on Christian Hill Road in Massachusetts. They had two daughters, my cousins Kathy and Karen. My Aunt Grace and Uncle Ben lived next door with their three sons, Wayne, Barry, and Scott.
There had once been a family farm on Christian Hill Road. My mother Phyllis grew up there with her older sisters Dot and Grace. She used to tell us stories about cutting the heads off chickens, about the Hurricane of ‘38, and about the day the barn burned. Phyllis married John, my father, who carried her away to New Hampshire.
So the Robinsons were the outliers. From childhood, my brothers Jeff and Brian and I were packed into the Ford (it was always a Ford) and returned to our maternal homestead. If you’re keeping score, that’s eight cousins. Thanksgivings, except when Wayne was in Vietnam and before the weddings and funerals began, were the only days we all came together.
The Thanksgiving traditions in 1980, according to what I wrote back then, were already beginning to shift and fray. We still sat, maybe 10 on each side, at a series of connected tables draped in white cloth that disguised the fissures and joints beneath. It stretched from the dining room to the living room. Uncle Karl sat at the head and carved the turkey. Uncle Ben occupied the foot where the pies later arrived and the cribbage games began. There was a perfunctory prayer followed by polite chaos.
Some things never change, the dates stuffed with peanut butter, for example, or the cut glass trays of mustard pickle. The revolution began, in my opinion, when Aunt Grace introduced the oyster casserole. Ironically, it was closer to an original Pilgrim appetizer than Aunt Dot’s traditional cranberry relish spiced with orange rind. Barry and his wife Peggy brought babies, lots of them. Cousin Wayne, who had married a South Carolina belle, brought 6-year-old Jeremy who spoke, to our Yankee horror, with the hint of a southern drawl. Someone brought a little bottle of Riunite wine and, for the Robinsons, it was as if the devil himself had put his feet up on the table.
It was that year, in the heyday of the family Thanksgiving, that I too broke from tradition. At the meal’s end, as the pies diminished, the little kids hit the backyard swing set where my cousins and I had played in the past. The teens and 20-somethings played dusk football, while the senior men gathered at the cribbage end of the table. The three sisters, by now, were gathered in the small black and white checked kitchen to handle the dishes and chat. For once, and only once, I volunteered to help wash dishes. The ladies put up with the break in tradition. I earned my equality merit badge, and was soon directed back to the living room where they said, I belonged.
With the outdoors dark and cold, the kids pulled out board games in the den. Brother Brian, an archaeologist, showed slides of his recent excursion to Peru. Cousin Scott, once the baby of the family, rushed off in response to a fire alarm. Uncle Francis, who always arrived late to “clean up the pies,” was snoring in an easy chair as someone’s baby explored his mountainous belly. My mother took Polaroids.
We lost Uncle Karl the following year and nothing was ever the same. The conjoined Thanksgiving party split and separated like cells under a microscope. The cousins and their offspring are all over the map now, from Florida to Nova Scotia. Each cell carries the DNA of Thanksgivings past. Babies are now having babies as the family customs morph. Aunt Grace and my father, representing the last of the Greatest Generation, are jogging neck and neck to see who hits their 100th birthday first.
Times change. Lives move on. The little brick house belongs to someone else now. But I don’t miss the annual feast on Christian Hill Road because I still have it. It’s in me. The smells and sounds are sharper than my mother’s fuzzy Polaroids. I remember the squeak of the chairs, the texture of the freshly ironed tablecloths, the heft of large spoons thick with turnip, mashed potato, and squash. I can see my family up and down the table. And even though it was never the same after that essay I wrote in 1980, Thanksgiving did its work, passing customs and beliefs from one generation to the next.
The three sisters from the little farm on Christian Hill Road created me and my cousins. Those eight children, steeped for decades in family tradition, became a nurse, a hairdresser, a surveyor, an EMT, a fireman, a carpenter, an archaeologist, and a writer. We’re all still here, somewhere, living out the latest version of the Thanksgiving we remember, passing plates of food down a long table of memory that stretches from room to room and year to year.
Copyright 1980 by J. Dennis Robinson, revised 202.0
When Your Dad Turns 100