Thanksgivings Past

Thinking about Thanksgivings past...

Images come into my head of apple-turkeys stabbed with toothpicks skewered with mini marshmallows and gumdrops. I guess it's a fine way of keeping kids feeling creatively involved in the festive process while the adults (okay, the womenfolk) worked like dogs on the feast we kids would soon criticize. A note of state-the-obvious: don't give kids free reign on a bag of gumdrops and mini-marshmallows and then later try to get them to eat purple-red-glop and seemingly chewed-up soggy bread just because it's "tradition".

Other memories include festive, extended-family dinners at Grandma & Grandpa's home in Detroit, where my birth order--5th oldest cousin out of ten--secured me a pernament sequester at the "kid-table". There were usually two kid-tables, with a vicious pecking order of who got to sit at the one closer to the "real" (turkey-clad) table. Those at the better kid-table got first dibs at dessert pies.

A kid-table prerequisite was for the card table to be sporting one bum leg, just to add a bit of excitement to the occasion. A favorite kid-table tradition by the older cousins was to wait until someone's milk glass was filled to the top, then furiously and savagely begin cutting into the meat portion on his or her plate, trying to upset the delicate balance of the card table.

Teenage-year Thanksgivings were the worst for cooperation and thankfulness. In my family of four kids (in an age-differential span of five years), the holiday may as well have been named the anti-thanksgiving. The order of the day was work avoidance, complaining about the looks of what was eventually going to  be plopped onto our plates, and campaigning for the use of paper plates for the meal since the mess was growing bigger as each quarter of the Lions' loss to the Bears progressed. If I was a parent in that household, I'd have canceled Thanksgiving and declared a day-of-drinking instead.

We still laugh about the time my younger brother declared that Grandma Cass' pumpkin pie meringue topping looked and tasted like styrofoam. Ah, teenagers and Thanksgiving: a dish best served as leftovers at noon on Friday.

Well, it's time to give thanks for all we have, and I'm thankful I have memories of Thanksgivings past. I will try to save some gumdrops and mini-marshmallows for the apple-turkeys.

Creativity Mandate

There must be some sort of nesting quality I have that spurs me to "be creative". When I was a kid, my sister and I, when needing a creative fix, declared "Let's do projects". And we did. We'd hunker down and create board games, write poetry, play pretend games, or discover an attic and transform it into a clubhouse.

It was so easy to just abandon everything and "do projects". Now that I'm old(er), doing projects has come to mean cleaning out the refrigerator, reorganizing my closet or finding the stepladder so as to replace all the burnt out light bulbs. (side note: think of creative reference for stepladder meaning not your real ladder, but the ladder your other ladder married after divorcing your real ladder. It's not the boss of you and never will be.)

Creativity gets squelched when you become a certain amount of "responsible". I guess I have reached that level. Weekends start out being so full of potential, too... Then eventually, thoughts of doing projects gets sucked into the void and replaced with appointments and schedules.

I hereby declare a mandate: a creativity mandate. I will create something everyday that is wholly unrelated to responsible, scheduled, committment-type behaviors. Perhaps I will take a photograph or post a blog entry or sew a pillow or write a poem. I may denounce my relationship with my stepladder and disinvite her to the light bulb and smoke detector battery's wedding. Maybe I'll just listen to a favorite song and think creatively for that time.

There I have it: Mandated Creativity. I like it.

Let's do projects!