Everyone has a favorite dish, unique tradition and method for dealing with the inevitable food coma that Thanksgiving brings each year. Your friendly Communications Committee thought it would be fun to share some of ours with you. As November 23rd draws near we wish each and every one of you a fun, safe carb-filled holiday. Whether you spend it with family or friends, on Amazon shopping for the Holidays or watching your beloved Detroit Lions suffer another Thanksgiving defeat (36-38-2 all time), have fun, be thankful and brine your dang turkey.
Coral Cardon
When I was a child growing up we had large family gatherings for Thanksgiving. Cousins would stay overnight and there was lots of fun and laughter, ice skating, snowmobile riding, tubing. I grew up in Wyoming and winter was really cold and snowy! The food was always so wonderful. A traditional late afternoon dinner affair with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole, candied yams, and homemade rolls was served and, of course, all the kids sat at the kiddy tables together. My grandmother’s mincemeat pie was the favorite dessert but I have to admit I never touched the stuff! Just the name made me cringe! Thanksgiving is also when I first fell in love with the game of football! I loved the Patriots back then simply because of their name and their red, white and blue uniforms. I learned the game and became a true fan during my high school days and have followed it ever since.
More recently, starting back in 2010, I started a tradition on Facebook called “Thirty Days of Thanks.” This is an event that anyone can participate in. Each day of November participants post something you are thankful for. It has been so fun to see what everyone is thankful for and a great exercise in expressing gratitude. Gratitude makes us happy and that is what life is all about; being happy!
Amy Clements
Years ago, we would have huge Thanksgiving celebrations with too many people to count. However, as time went by the extended family moved on with their own traditions and our table was not as full as it had been in the past. Occasionally, we would have someone who did not have family to celebrate with and they were invited into our home. After a couple of years, my father started a tradition where we would always set one empty place setting “just in case.”
As our family has grown again, we still set an extra place setting and tradition has extended to honor the friends and family we have lost over the years but still remains open for a friend who wants to join our celebration.
Rob Guyott
As I became an adult I realized that Thanksgiving was about more than dry turkey and the inept Detroit Lions. Thanksgiving was about friends and loved ones and my table was available for anyone who didn’t have a place to go. We called it Orphan Thanksgiving. There would often be 10 to 20 people at my apartment and eventually my home, sampling each other’s favorite dishes and more than a normal share of wine and bourbon. We became the family that we chose and seldom did any of us have relatives in attendance. Still today, with my wonderful little family, our door is open to anyone who doesn’t have a place to be on Thanksgiving. The turkey is better (why didn’t they brine it?), the wine more expensive and the company is as good as ever.
Allison Peryea
In my opinion, Thanksgiving is best spent in a bathing suit on a beach towel. For many of the past several years, I have celebrated Thanksgiving on the beach somewhere warm. Four of the past seven years I have gone to Mexico, usually to meet with my sister and friends. We stay at all-inclusive resorts that have their own restaurants that rarely serve Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing. But the point is that we do not have to cook and are eating anyway, and also do not have to clean up. One year we had Italian, and another year—the same year my sister got married in Playa del Carmen—we had Brazilian food. I have also met up with my family to stay at a condo in Florida, where my mom was somehow able to put together a great Thanksgiving meal in someone else’s kitchen.
Lisa Ford
I have two long-held Thanksgiving traditions, both of which err to the cheesy side but feel sincerely important. The first is that I MUST watch as much of the Macy’s parade in New York as is humanly possible. I can’t get enough of the intricacy of the floats, the steadiness of the drummers in the band, the giant balloons with minds of their own, the perfectly choreographed dancers with perfectly maintained perma-grins and Al Rokers chuckle at every turn. Sadly, no one in my family feels quite so passionately, so it is a constant battle to keep the TV tuned in until Santa makes his arrival but I keep trying!
My second tradition is to encourage (ok and sometimes force) everyone around the table to express that for which they are most grateful in the year. Repeated sentiments (such as family and health) are okay as long as they are sincere and shared with utmost honesty. I never fail to learn and appreciate something surprising that has touched someone at the table and I like to think that we all leave feeling more connected. Having a spirit of joy and thanksgiving for people and experiences (like watching a parade!) is what Thanksgiving is all about for me.
Kurt Youenes
I grew up in a family with 5 kids that included my two triplet siblings, Teresa and Mark—I was born in a crowd—and the Thanksgivings I remember most fondly were even more crowded gatherings of 25 or more at my Uncle Gil’s house, a house tucked into a steep green hillside in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood. It is a holiday for me that is steeped in a panoply or dare I say a menagerie of traditions. There was always a fire burning in the downstairs rec room fireplace, the smell of cedar, striking a cozy and distinctly Northwest note on what was more often than not a cold blustery November day in Seattle; storms were a tradition too. There were pies of course, none better than grandmother Anna’s apple pie, a tradition passed down to my mother Ann and sister Teresa, and while Gravenstein apples were preferred, it was all about the crust! And there was that Thanksgiving when a martini was accidentally knocked over into the Turkey gravy being prepared on the stovetop by one of the exuberant cooks that became a traditional ingredient. Uncle Gil, our favorite uncle, was both admired by his young nieces and nephews and admonished by our aunt Tib for throwing rather than passing rolls; his unpredictable curve ball became a tradition too. And then there was, in what I think of as emblematic of the holiday, the tradition of welcoming unattached visitors to Thanksgiving dinner, somewhat along the lines of Truman Capote’s quintessential story, “The Thanksgiving Visitor” that has become a reading tradition every fall for me. Ah, the good old days, the feeling of warmth on a cold November day!
www.wscai.org 21
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32