Melting Snow

My Best and Worst Thanksgivings

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

"Our modern celebration of Thanksgiving can be traced back to the early 17th century. Upon arriving in Plymouth, at the culmination of months of testing travel that resulted in death and disease, the Pilgrims continued to face great challenges. An indigenous people, the Wampanoag, helped them adjust to their new home, teaching them critical survival techniques and important crop cultivation methods. After securing a bountiful harvest, the settlers and Wampanoag joined in fellowship for a shared dinner to celebrate powerful traditions that are still observed at Thanksgiving today: lifting one another up, enjoying time with those around us, and appreciating all that we have."

Barack Obama, 2015 November 20th, quoted from The White House Office of the Press Secretary

The "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"  prompt for Day 988
What was your best Thanksgiving? What was your worst Thanksgiving?

What was my best Thanksgiving? There wasn't just a single Thanksgiving that was my best. My best Thanksgivings occurred when I was a child in Blackwell, Oklahoma. Those were the Thanksgiving Days I spent at my Grandparents' house in the Smelter Heights. While it's true that there were many times in my childhood that were not pleasant none of those occurred at Grandpa and Grandma's house. I loved spending holidays there because I knew that Grandma would be cooking in preparation for the big holiday meal.

Helping Grandma prepare for a meal was fun. True many times the only thing that my sister or I did was wash the dishes while Grandma prepared the food. It was still fun because I spent those days with my grandparents. During the week of Thanksgiving the house smelled delicious because Grandma was baking pies for the big Thanksgiving feast.

On Thanksgiving we all gathered around the dining room table. Grandpa would say the blessing, he could say a prayer of Gratitude without any preparation. I knew by the way he said the prayer that he believed in God. Grandpa wasn't a man to flaunt his faith in front of people, but you knew by the simple and direct prayers that he said that he had a deep faith.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Grandpa would get us into his car. Once everyone was in the car he would drive into the center of town where we would pick out a living Christmas tree. My grandparents never put up a tree until after Thanksgiving. They never decorated the inside of the house until after Thanksgiving and they never decorated the outside at all.

What was my worst Thanksgiving? There are two Thanksgivings that via for my worst Thanksgiving. The first is the last Thanksgiving I cooked a whole turkey. I'm not precisely sure what year it was, but I know it was either 2008 or 2009. We didn't have a working oven, but we received a free turkey from one of the food pantries. They ask if we had cooking facilities without asking what kind of cooking facilities we had. What we had was a stove top with two burner working and a microwave.

Anyway we received a fifteen or twenty pound turkey, which was too big to put whole in our microwave. Instead of calling friends or family to ask if they could cook the turkey for us, I decided that the best way to approach the situation was to cut the turkey up and cook it piece by piece in the microwave. I cut the cold recently defrosted bird up. By the time I finished carving the raw turkey my hands were almost frozen or at least the felt like they were. After carving the bird, I proceeded to cook it in the microwave. I'm not sure how long it took me to cook that turkey, but it was a long time.

The second worst Thanksgiving was the year my mother died. I fixed stove top stuffing with turkey gravy (purchased in a jar) we didn't have a turkey or any type of meat. For dessert we had a Marie Calendar's pumpkin pie. Mama ate some of the stuffing with gravy and one slice of pie with Cool Whip. Mom died one week later on November 29, 2012.