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Thanksgiving Traditions

Plain and Simple

Here come the holidays! 

Thanksgiving has long been a bit precarious for this place I call home. For 30+ years now I have lived on the other side of the country from my parents and siblings. Traveling “home” to the other coast for the major Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays became a real hassle.  So sometimes I get melancholy thinking that all my local friends have family nearby to visit while I didn’t–it was just us, our blended family with no aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.  It was a struggle to make these family holidays my own when I much wanted to be with my parents and siblings sharing the responsibilities of cooking and spending time together.  Creating a blended family often left me feeling left out.  So I  have spent decades learning to embrace our uniqueness and making creative heartfelt collections of unique traditions. (Is that an oxymoron?) 

I want to share with you some of the things that have been incorporated into the lives of my family.

  1. The DINNER

Order up!!

This is something I cooked up quite some years ago (pun intended.) When I was part of a blended household and kids were coming and going on odd vs. even years and at certain times on Thanksgiving Day…I could barely keep it all straight. And so, one year, I decided to embrace our uniqueness and declare favorite dishes.  Everyone gets to place their order for something on the table.  Anything.   One year, the stepsons really tested this out and we had 4 kinds of meat on the table.  Sure we always have a turkey, but I also want duck.  We have had my famous mac n’ cheese, ribs, acorn squash, artichokes (out of season) , fried rice specifically from the Chinese restaurant up the street. You name it! I’m sure at some point someone ordered it and it was on the table.  (Hint: as the chef you don’t have to have a family sized dish of an item.  Some dishes no one will eat except the person ordering it, so, for example just one acorn squash is enough.  Also, ask about 2 weeks in advance. Some kids want to think about it and it gives you time to shop for ingredients.)

  1. The “GIVING”

The day after Thanksgiving we have all the kids do a rather hefty clearing out.  They go through all the toys they either don’t really play with any longer or are ready to give up.  They know Christmas is just around the corner. So all the toys that are broken we get rid of but the ones that are slightly used, unused and really in decent condition we box up and put on the hearth.  The tradition goes that on the night after Thanksgiving Santa comes down the chimney to collect all unwanted toys.  He brings them back to the North Pole for inspection and repair and then on Christmas Day delivers them to children around the world who are thrilled to have them.  

I found my kids were always quite generous and honest. They played a part in sifting through their toys, making important decisions, letting go and doing good in the world by giving. There were times they surprised me by saying that some one could use a certain toy more than they. Or keeping a toy because it was something that my sister had given and it reminded them of her.  ( A child as young as 5 can do this!)

  1. The THANKS  

Make a thankful collage.

Body Tracing Activity | The moffatt girls, Measurement activities, Activities

Materials:

  • Butcher paper & tape
  • Markers
  • Old magazines
  • glue sticks
  • scissors 

Are you going to have several kids around? Here’s a great idea to keep them working together on a creative project for a while.  Tape butcher paper to walls for each kid.  Have older kids help younger kids trace an outline of themselves. Have kids title it “I am thankful for…”  and then have them draw in their outline/silhouette with them wearing their favorite outfit.  Draw and cut out from magazines some things for which they are grateful.

All cousins and grandkids can take them home when they leave. It’s a great reminder for them and they can even add to it throughout the year. I would like to think they’d hang it on their bedroom wall.

  1.  The BLESSING

Every year, no matter where we are, I read this excerpt of Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation. 

**Click here to read the original speech **

Some years I add a word or two here and there to bring poignancy to just how much it correlates to our current events and to bring folks back in. Beside me choking up absolutely every year, there is usually at least one other tear jerker in the house when they hear it. If I can plant a seed and bring someone to a point of inspiration and true appreciation, I consider that a GREAT day.  Luckily I have Abe on my side to assist. 

  1.  A Holiday Movie

I know….really commercial right?!  The truth is, I really don’t enjoy going to the movie theaters to watch movies.  Honestly,  I critique them too much to enjoy them.  I think they are overpriced and the ridiculous amount of money that goes into them honestly, I find a little sickening. Hollywood so rarely meets my expectations that it’s not really ‘entertaining’ for me.  Sure, I go, once in a while but it’s just not my jam.  Sure I watch the movies years later on Netflix and I like them alright, even better than I would have had I paid $15 at a theater back when it was popular and ‘everyone else’ was going to see it.  

However, the feel good brightly colored family friendly movies that are released on Thanksgiving and Christmas day every year.  YEP!  I love going to those. If not right on Thanksgiving day then the next day…you know after the kids have finished with “the giving.” 

What are some of your favorite memories or traditions for Thanksgiving?

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Intentional Gratitude

Today I bring to you a writing from “the Ancients.”  My favorite president of all time  Abraham Lincoln.  

As part of the human condition, we come at odds with each other.  During Lincoln’s term so much so that we went to war brother against brother.  I know we are at a war of words among ourselves these days all over the decisions of our current president.  (I am going to TRY to write this without actually GIVING my opinion of Donald Trump.)  I want to focus on the solidarity of our times in comparison to the times of Abraham Lincoln.

The American people as a whole are at diverse odds among AND between ourselves.  The “writing of the ancients” that I offer to you today puts into perspective that, yet again, this is part of the human condition.  This has happened before and humanity has survived.   The United States of America has survived.  Thrived?  Yes, even thrived. (NOT something SOME nations and countries can attest to.  USSR, Siam, Persia, Suriname… to name a few.) 

How did we do it?  To what can we owe our salvation and preservation? GRATITUDE.  Being thankful and NOT FORGETTING to what or whom we owe this gratitude.  And yet we do, we DO forget.  Time and time again we are steered off course to focus on, who?  Ourselves? Our president?  Our perceived enemy?

What you are about to read is a piece I discovered decades ago.  I was so taken aback that I have been reading it at the Thanksgiving Meal as a traditions ever since.  No matter what family I am with or who is visiting in my household, I read this piece out loud every year as or as part of the blessing before dinner. Always before a completely captive-if not sometimes captivated-audience.  After 9-11-2001 it brought even MORE poignancy and I inserted timely verbiage on the spot to include “our soldiers in Afghanistan.”  I encourage you to do the same.  Make it timely for ourselves.  

The president of the United States of America, in 1863, thought this debt of gratitude so CRUCIAL to the survival of our nation that he proclaimed we take an entire day, together as a nation to honor and REMEMBER.  Take a step back out of the ring, the world does not revolve around you, or me or “us”or “them” but something/someone far far greater.

THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION

ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S 
THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION OF
1863

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness or our hearts, that all these blessing were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father Who dwelleth in the heavens.

(signed) A. Lincoln
October 3, 1863