Thanksgiving thoughts

This Thanksgiving, like all those before it throughout the years, I’m deeply grateful for family.

Good health comes in second as the years click by.

When thinking back on all the Thanksgiving holidays from childhood, big feasts with tons of family members always come to mind.

So many people who gathered around a big dining room table in my late paternal grandparents’ West Pittsfield farmhouse are now gone. They are probably still celebrating somewhere together in the other realm of life.

The farmhouse is still there and has long ago been taken over by owners outside the family. Sad but true.

My aunt and paternal grandmother fixed so many turkey dinners with all the trimmings in the early years of my life.

Images are recorded in my mind like silent movies. I can see a burgundy velvet sofa in the living room.

There are many people at the lace covered table in the dining room and everything looks and smells delicious. There are glasses, gleaming silverware and, of course, big Tom Turkey taking center stage.

After dinner, we kids skedaddled as the men started playing pinochle and drinking “high balls.”  We hated the thick cigar smoke whirling around in the air. The women got stuck with the massive clean-up.

As the family grew and it became impossible to fit everyone in grandma and grandpa’s house, individual families began having their own celebrations on Thanksgiving.

In our house, my mom made many turkeys all through my teenage years.

She had this old-fashioned metal grinder that clipped to the side of the kitchen table. That’s how she squished all the gizzards and chicken livers that went into the stuffing.

It sounds disgusting but giblet stuffing is food for the gods. It’s that delicious. The recipe originated with my Lithuanian grandma.

My maternal grandmother, too, prepared many feasts on the holiday. In that house, with its white kitchen curtains trimmed with red crocheted borders, grandma served Polish food along with the turkey.

Her babka, round Polish bread resplendent with fat yellow currents and thin slices of almonds, made the house smell like heaven.

Grandma would cut the bread, still warm from the oven, and spread each piece with real butter. I can’t imagine a more delicious treat, even all these decades later.

In the early years of my own marriage (eons ago), I started making Thanksgiving turkey dinners, too.

During the years we lived far away from New England and family-of-origin members, my heart always felt heavy at Thanksgiving. I dearly missed my parents and sisters, especially, and longed for the old days.

However, I had my own husband and two kids to love. Traditions die hard so the Thanksgiving feasts continued.  We always invited other people to join us for dinner in our home in the southwestern desert.

Now back on the east coast, I miss those dear friends who joined us for dinner and helped us celebrate the day of gratitude. Nothing in life is ever perfect, is it?

If each one of us were to write down a list of all the things we are grateful for, we’d be writing well past Thanksgiving Day.

At the top of my list would be faith in God, who began blessing me with the first breath of life. Truly, I really am deeply grateful for the gift of living on this planet.

Secondly, I’m grateful for all the love I’ve been given for decades.

That would be followed by my beloved husband, who is truly my soul mate; my son and daughter and now their spouses; my four sisters and their families, which include all my sweet nieces and nephews; all my friends; good health, eyesight, hearing, the ability to walk, our home and our pink fireplace, our beloved 16 year-old cat, collections, my daily blog, writing and taking photos for The Beacon and on and on.

See? All those things for which to be grateful came after only one minute of thinking. My gratitude list would go around the world and back and still not end and probably yours would, too.

This year, 2012, I have one more immense blessing to add to my gratitude list, and that is my new baby granddaughter.  Now two months old, the little cutie pie fills my heart with even more love than I ever thought possible.

The other day after picking her up and looking into her beautiful dark pools of eyes, she gave me the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

“Oh my gosh,” I called out to my daughter. “The baby smiled at me, the little doll.”

That precious gift from my little darling grandbaby, believe it or not, was even better than the first bite of Tom Turkey will ever be!

Posted by Susan M. Wicker Guerrero on November 20, 2012. Filed under Columns,From the Heart,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry