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.
