Another Thanksgiving weekend has arrived. Families are gathering around a large dead bird and announcing the things that have occurred in the past year that have made them thankful. My family is no exception.
At our house, Thanksgiving is a bit of a big deal. The entire extended family gathers for the full weekend and doesn’t leave until the last cranberry in the house has been consumed. But this wasn’t always the case for me. When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a somewhat smaller affair.
In the Wilbanks household, Thanksgiving was not a huge gathering or celebration. I remember in school I would do all the typical Thanksgiving things – cut out hand-shaped turkeys, paste together brown and tan paper chains, and assemble pinecone and peanut butter bird feeders – but most of that stuff found its way into the garbage can before the turkey in the oven was even brown.
On the day itself, it was typically a small gathering in our house. My dad’s parents had both died before I was nine, and my mom’s parents rarely bothered to come to our house. I suppose the 90-minute drive from San Juan Bautista was just too much of an ordeal for them (although if we ever failed to drive to their house for Christmas dinner, we would hear about it from my grandmother nonstop for the next year). My mom’s brother and his wife would show up on occasion, but since they lived in Los Angeles at the time it was understandable that they usually stayed home.
My dad’s many brothers and sisters all had their own family obligations so, we never saw any of them. Besides, all of the aunts and uncles and cousins on my dad’s side of the family got together once a year for a family reunion in the summer, and by Thanksgiving most of the fights and arguments that occurred at the reunion hadn’t yet been resolved. I will probably delve into the Wilbanks Family Reunions in more detail in a later blog. For now, let’s stay focused on Thanksgiving.
My two brothers are both much older than I am, and they had already moved out of the house by the time I was eight. They would, however, both come over on Thanksgiving to eat with us. My oldest brother, Dennis would typically show up late on Thanksgiving Day. The rest of us would already be eating when his beat-up Camaro would pull into the driveway. He showed up, said hi to my dad, then asked him for money because he needed gas in his car, or he was behind on his rent. My mom would hand him a paper plate, point at the half-mutilated carcass of the turkey, and tell him to get something to eat before she threw it all away.
Dennis would fix a plate of food, then go ask dad for money again.
I remember one year was a little different from the others, however. Dennis arrived, late as usual, but when mom handed him a plate, he said, “No thanks. I stopped and ate a couple burgers on the way here.” I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I absolutely believe he stopped for burgers on the way to a Thanksgiving meal, I just couldn’t believe he said it out loud to mom’s face. Dennis was never the most socially adept person I knew, but I thought he had at least had enough survival instincts not to poke a sleeping bear.
Turns out I was dead wrong.
To be fair to Dennis, mom was not the best cook in the neighborhood. Her turkey was typically just shy of being inedible. By the time she was done baking it, the turkey had the taste of sawdust but had a slightly lower moisture content.
It was the same meal every year. There were black olives that, as soon as they hit the table, I grabbed up ten of them (one on each finger, of course) then ran off before my mom could yell at me to wait for the rest of the food. The olives were followed by the bright red tube of cranberry sauce that still retained the shape of the can it came out of, and a plate of yams with marshmallow on top that nobody ever touched but mom insisted on making anyway. It was a family “tradition,” she said. Apparently throwing away an entire plate of untouched yams every year was also a “tradition” in our house.
Next came the bland, gluey, mashed potatoes. Eating them was like eating the paste they gave you in kindergarten, only with slightly less flavor. My grandmother always made great mashed potatoes with plenty of milk and butter because … well, because she was a normal person. However, she never bothered to pass that particular recipe down to my mom who figured a little salt added to that glutenous mass was all the seasoning it needed. On a few occasions she would put down a little bowl of gravy to go with the potatoes, but the stuff had the color and consistency of motor oil that badly needed to be changed. I never had the courage to find out what it tasted like.
The only part of the meal I looked forward to (besides the olives) was the stuffing. Stove Top stuffing hit the market in 1972, and it reached the Wilbanks Thanksgiving meal a few years after that. All you needed to do was put all the stuff in the box into a pot of boiling water and stir. Even my mom had a hard time ruining that part of the meal. Not that she didn’t try. There were frequently burned bits from the bottom of the pot that she would stir into the rest of the stuffing to “hide” her mistake.
Still, it was the best thing on the table. And it was usually gone by the time I got close enough to the table to fill up my plate. One box of stuffing is supposed to feed four people. There were five of us. So … go figure.
Don’t get me wrong. I have fond memories of Thanksgiving as I was growing up as well. It wasn’t all bad.
There were olives.
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