To my mind, Halloween has always represented the top of a slide; a long slide, the big metal kind that burns your legs in summer, but not so badly that you don’t mount the ladder a second, and even a third, time. And, it doesn’t go straight down. There are twists and turns, and bumps and dips. All in all, it’s a pretty raucous ride.

Thanksgiving used to represent one of the bumps, a high-point on the path towards the next bump of Christmas, on the way to the New Year’s sand pit that leaves tiny black flecks on the backs of your calves and the palms of your hands.

Nowadays, though, I would characterize Thanksgiving as more of a twist, a turn requiring careful navigation before resuming the descent.

My reticence about the holiday became clear to me a couple of years ago as I read posts on a social website to which I subscribed. There were several prompts along the line of “How Will You Spend Your Thanksgiving?”, and “Share Your Favorite Thanksgiving Memory”. As I scanned menus I wouldn’t choose from and ticked off strangers’ guest lists, complete with anecdotes, I began to feel sad. It became clear, relatively quickly, that my plan to post a virtual cornucopia of familial dysfunction would elicit a reaction similar to that experienced by a person unable to quash a particularly loud belch after finishing an elegant meal. Not that I have ever been in that exact situation, mind you. My embarrassing belch came disguised as a yawn, which I shielded prettily with one hand, in hopes that our English teacher wouldn’t mistake a night of late-night TV for impolite disinterest. The offending sound was as much a surprise to me as it was to the quarterback of our high school football team, who sat in the next row and two desks closer to the front of the room. His was the only face to turn in my direction.

“Excuse you!”, he bellowed through his laugh which soon became a chorus.

I responded with a weak smile, refusing to acquiesce to an overwhelming desire to escape the room. My intention here, though, is not to write about teenage angst.

My mother was a product of the times in which she lived. The decade of the sixties is widely associated with peace, love, and rock and roll. But due to a burgeoning space program, the sixties also ushered in canned vegetables, enveloped spice packs, and crystallized orange drink. Grocery stores remodeled to make room for the “Freezer Section”, and my mother was all over it.

She made an exception, though, at holiday time. Thanksgiving dinners were prepared fresh, with only the finest ingredients, and usually featured the same dishes year after year. One holiday she decided her Coke Salad was boring, and introduced instead a pale, orange concoction featuring apricots. Realizing our dinner wouldn’t include plump, juicy cherries confined by coke-flavored cottage cheese, I loudly bemoaned her decision. My sisters echoed my sentiment and the cherries were back in place the following year. What I didn’t realize until recently, though, is that while the center of our table might have been held by a large pine-cone, threaded with multi-colored strips of construction paper, my mother was truly our Thanksgiving centerpiece.

This year, Thanksgiving will find my sister, Candi, hosting her husband’s family at their beach-side condominium. It sounds like a lovely way to spend the holiday, but I wasn’t invited. After assisting with accommodations for the in-laws, my father called seeking reassurance that his three remaining daughters could provide a holiday at “home”. Two weeks later, he called again.

Several telephone calls later resulted in our “family dinner” being held in Cleveland, Georgia, a picturesque mountain town about an hour and a half outside of Atlanta. My sister, Holly, is excited to serve turkey she raised from a chick. I visited the unfortunate fowl a couple of weeks ago. At that point she hadn’t decided which of the several strikingly unattractive birds would make the sacrifice. That’s okay…I didn’t really want to know.

All three of my children have chosen to settle near the town of their birth, necessitating a seventy-five mile drive to my house for Thanksgiving. My daughter will work until four in the afternoon, pushing our dinner late into the evening. They will settle for a store-bought turkey, smoked the day before, and my impressions of the earlier celebration. They will bring friends. My house will be packed to over-flowing, and laughter will fill every corner of every room.

But, I’ll still miss the cherries…

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