Skip to main content

Giving Thanks

Praise the LORD! Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever.
Psalm 106:1

It's Thanksgiving week! Visions of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole,  pies, and carb overload are dancing through my head along with sleeping arrangements, linen supplies, and bathroom logistics. Our home will be full of family - three generations this year and a very special longtime friend will join us too.

We'll resume our family tradition of watching A Christmas Story after dinner-something we haven't been able to do as an extended family for several years. Of course there'll be football throughout the day and napping, although I'm not sure you can do that with two 3-year olds running around. Maybe I can talk my husband into building a cozy fire in the fireplace and our girls will entertain us with some piano duets. I imagine you're now running through your schedule of events for Thursday. It's probably similar to mine.

Big holiday celebrations are always opportunities for those "special" memories. Thankfully, no brawls or ugly scenes have ever occurred at our family gatherings, but here are a few of my Thanksgiving favorites:
  • Eating too much cranberry sauce as a kid with disastrous results. I still abstain (shudder).
  • Making the rounds as a young married couple to three Thanksgiving dinners in one day. We had to sleep off turkey intoxication. It was a painful gastric experience.
  • Our youngest daughter at age 5 or 6 overindulging on pumpkin pie. As you can imagine, the aftermath wasn't pretty. Extremely similar to my cranberry experience.
  • Intense Rook and Scrabble games at my sister-in-law's that went long into the evening.
  • My mother-in-law's embarrassment at forgetting to remove the paper liner from her purchased pie crust. It baked nicely with the pumpkin filling, but was a little fibrous.
  • My step-grandmother's inedible crunchy stuffing experiment.
  • My brother-in-law, Bill carving the turkey with surgical precision. It was a beautiful sight!
  • Beginning new traditions with Arizona friends around our table.
 I can hardly wait to add the memories we'll gather this Thanksgiving. It's the real bounty at our table, which comes so graciously from the Heavenly Father's hand. May your table be blessed as well.
Taste and see that the LORD is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him! Psalm 34:8

Labels

Comments

JD said…
Nice reading your memories, especially the one about Bill! I love how family continue to remember him...but then he WAS pretty unforgettable! We'll be having the same kind of gathering at Christmas. I'm looking forward to lots of fun, cousins enjoying each other, new memories and some Davis traditions!
November 20, 2011
LrdClbrn said…
"It baked nicely with the pumpkin filling, but was a little fibrous." Bwaaa hahahahahaha!! Just beautiful. Happy Thanksgiving!
November 23, 2011
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Castile Knapper

It's always fun to have family members who have a bit of notoriety because of interesting pursuits. My husband's cousin, Ken Wallace is one of those.  Ken is an artist who works in stone as a flintknapper. Flintknapping is the ancient art of shaping tools and weapons from pieces of stone. Knapping was part of the survival skill set of Native Americans. Arrowheads, knives, hatchets, and more were shaped from raw pieces of flint or chert.  Ken knapping at the Wallace Reunion Ken became interested in this process back in 1985. One of his favorite pastimes was searching fields for arrowheads, both of which are pretty plentiful in Western New York. Freshly plowed ground in rural areas often yields many different types of arrowheads since the Iroquois were the original residents of what are now corn fields and cow pastures. Fascinated with how the Iroquois made their weapons and tools, Ken started to try and recreate them. He says a lot of trial and error were involved in the...
1 comment
Read more

Victim of Circumstances?

 The article below has been getting a lot of hits lately, and I thought it may be time to repost it. A couple of weeks ago, I took the picture below. I thought it pretty much sums up our life journey. We never know what's around the corner for us.  Circumstances change in seconds some days. Whether the circumstances of life are good or bad, we're fond of blaming them for how we behave and think. Here are a few of the well-used excuses:  "I'm a victim of circumstances.""The situation is impossible." "The circumstances are beyond my control." "Under the circumstances"...fill in the blank. Funny how principles, self-control, and  positive thinking can go out the window when we're "under the circumstances."  And lest you think the author is above blaming circumstances, she is not. I've used most of the excuses above, whether spoken or unspoken.  An imprisoned and wrongly accused Jewish C...
1 comment
Read more

Smores Anyone?

We lived in the same house for 25 years just outside of our small hometown of Castile. It was a good little neighborhood and was mostly quiet except for the traffic on Route 39. When the signs of spring arrived, it was also time to pile up tree branches, and clean out the garage or the shed of burnable miscellany. Each year there seemed to be a contest between my husband and the next door neighbor to assemble a burn pile of enormous proportions.  Day after day I watched their piles grow until tepee-shaped woodpiles were just right to be torched. There was an art to the arrangement so that it would be totally consumed in a short amount of time. It was sort of like a bonfire on steroids. Now the neighbor enjoyed the element of surprise on the neighborhood and waited for quiet Saturday afternoons to begin his incendiary activity. KABOOM! You would have thought we were under attack by enemy forces. Then there was a rush of wind and the crackling of the k...
2 comments
Read more