Tag Archives: Family Traditions

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No Holiday Prep Here–And It’s Divine

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Any other year I would have purchased my turkey by now.  Would have fretted over it, the size, the brand, frozen or fresh?  Would have wondered if you had already beat me to the best turkeys, the most favored size.  Too small and you run out, too big and risk setting the oven of fire, which I did, three years ago.

The canned pumpkin would have been bought, also my favorite pecans, possibly the yams.  There would be a notation in my calendar indicating what date to buy bread so it can get properly stale.  One year I bought my bread too early, thinking, stale bread is stale bread.  No, my friends, it is not. 

On these errands I would be thinking of how I drove my grandmother around to gather all the staples for Thanksgiving.  The bread from the discount bread place.  Celery from Wetzel’s.  Maybe the turkey from there, too. 

This year, I will prepare pies, and only pies.  And even that isn’t a requirement, but a suggestion if I feel like it. 

For the first time in decades, decades, I tell you, I am not fixing a turkey, nor dressing, nor yams nor cranberries, nor nuthin’. Except maybe those pies. 

When my brother-in-law’s daughter floated the idea of hosting Thanksgiving at theirs, he laughed and said, well,  good luck getting Kathy and Greta to let loose of doing the dinner. He honestly thinks we enjoy it. And now I wonder if my Granny Opal loved all the preparation and work as much as I assumed she did. 

Kathy and I jumped, or would have if either of us were able, at the idea of showing up, eating, and going home.  That we had to drive to do it, a nice little hour and half jaunt through Indiana, well, that was even better.  An adventure, an “over the river and through the woods” sort of thing.  

It must be said, I pride myself on doing the Thanksgiving food, but I have grown weary of it.  Kathy, less enamored with cooking than I, prides herself on her house, big enough for us all and comfortable, well-appointed with centerpieces and decoration that have required thought and artistic expression. 

She can cook, but the aggravation of preparing the meal while trying to feed kids who mess up the kitchen and get in her way, well, it’s been a nice set up.  I cook, she cleans and decorates, and the kids, if they can be bothered, drag out to my car to help carry in the bird, the dressing and various pots and pans full of food.

But this year.  This year!  We have accepted Mandi and Chuck’s kind offer and we will turn up on the day to feast and feast and feast some more. Spend the night if we want.  Spend two.

Here is the other thing.  We will not even have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving.  We will gather on Friday to accommodate a couple of conflicting schedules, and that is just fine, too. 

Never did my family do this.  There wasn’t a pressing need, really, but even if there might have been, my mother was not one to flex.  

We were lucky as a family that we all lived close enough to see each other often, so it didn’t seem a tragedy if a few were missing from the table. We would see them on Saturday. 

But nor did my mother guilt my married siblings when they spent a holiday with the in-laws.  She insisted they do, sometimes, if a set of parents were aging and and she felt like she would have years with her children they would not. It was a kind and thoughtful gesture in her matter-of-fact way. 

Although I worry sometimes we blow off too many family obligations–any kind of obligation–these days.  Attending the funeral, choosing skiing over the holiday with family.  Just not showing up, however that may look.  This new bunch of people we have about us — notorious for not showing up.  The ones aggrieved at going to the office three days a week–how cruel! Never mind an entire workweek. 

But this year, I see how this easing of tradition has suited me just fine.  Better than fine. I see how it reduces stress for my niece and her husband with the three little ones.  They can be with his family on Thursday, all relaxed and happy.  Then with us, in Indiana, also relaxed and happy. 

How surprisingly easy it has been to let some things go. 

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Decoration Day, Then and Now

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My grandmother called it Decoration Day and told stories of picnicking among the stones of her departed family members, in a prairie cemetery in Indian Territory, in what is now east Oklahoma. The Paxtons would descend on the windswept and flat parcel of land and spend the whole day. They sang. They played games. They cleaned the graves of dead flowers and planted new ones to be buffeted by the wind, but that was just fine, because it gave the impression of dancing, those bobbing heads, in a stark and lonely place, there, on the outskirts of town.


I think she wanted us to recreate the picnic at Elmwood Cemetery or, rather, she wished we could, but knew such a thing would be impossible, unseemly, not done. The story appalled my mother. But Granny never failed to mention it on those long-ago Saturday mornings as she popped the trunk and hauled out tools, watering cans and washtubs full of flowers.


We followed her, our Keds and Red Ball Jets growing wet at the toes, then cold and uncomfortable as we trudged up the small rise to the place where our people lay, all of them, a case of serendipity having orchestrated both sets of grandparents with plots in spitting distance of each other.


“Look for the statute of the girl missing a finger,” she called over her shoulder. “That is our landmark.” And there she is, Bernice Fitts, who left this world at the age of eighteen, a giantess missing a finger, pointing, and not pointing, in the direction of the grandfather I never knew.
We were always excited, but subdued, too. We understood, as much as we were able, that this was a solemn duty and there were things here, mysterious and big, echoes of Sunday sermons, bellies of whales, lion’s dens, the dead to rise again. All of it scary and thrilling and incomprehensible.


But it was fun, too. An outing. A tradition. We were not a family to visit the cemetery regularly; we didn’t decorate graves for the seasons, on holidays or the birthdays of the departed. We might wander up to Elmwood on a pretty day, a moody afternoon, but never to linger.


Yet, Memorial Day was sacred, although we never used that word. But to ignore it, to miss one, would wrack me with guilt, and my sister, too.


Now, we call up, half-ashamed, asking if the other has taken flowers to the cemetery, hoping the answer is yes, so we are off the hook. The answer is always, no. We scurry around then, and gather plants and a watering can, and tend the graves in the most perfunctory of ways. But we feel better afterward, and both of us sigh with relief and satisfaction as we pull out onto Breckenridge and get on with our day. A duty done.


My mother was in the habit there toward the end of buying hanging baskets she would place on the graves and retrieve later for her summer garden. This was a great idea I thought, yet it worried her someone would steal them, so she sent me out early on Tuesday morning to bring them home. And people do steal them. Never our pots because they weren’t special, just some impatiens, still too small to make much of a display, but the nice ones, the specially made arrangements, these disappear.


We need not discuss what makes people do this, how low-bred, how disrespectful. We know exactly the sort to help themselves to a remembrance left for a loved one. To dwell on it is to wish for a stone hut on an isolated island in which to live out our days, away from people, just about all of them. To give up on them.


And some days I do give up on them. But not most days.

And some days I remember so clearly being a child of four, seven, ten.
The cool and damp of a May morning, the bucket of peonies in my grandmother’s trunk, children running in a game to find their grandparents who are only stories to them, faded photos, this gray stone. Another child, or just so recently a child, her head bending on a slender neck, her upraised and fingerless hand, showing the way.

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Easter Then, Easter Now

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It could be fall if I go only by that which I can hear.  The rain outside, nothing dramatic or torrential, but steady, comforting in its way, as the evening grows darker. The house feels humid, though, not on the verge of cold, as it does in autumn, but still on some dark mornings I wake and I am not quite sure what season it is, especially when it rains. 

The birds give it away on those mornings I wake early. I find them irksome in principle because they hinder my falling back to sleep.  It simply  isn’t done to admit this about the early spring birds, so I ask you keep my confidence on this. 

Last week some of us woke to hail, then it cleared into a bright sunny day, only to cloud up and hail some more, or was it sleet, or was it ice, in the afternoon.  My sister and I had a bit of  a tiff over it as we stood in in her kitchen and watched her puppies run around in it, oblivious to whatever it was. 

I would say we are having a bad spring, but of course, we are not. No tornado warnings to speak of, warm nights followed by cool days followed by freeze warnings followed by cold days followed by sunshine and balmy breezes.  

A typical spring, then.  

In recent years we have been bestowed with springs that seem to begin in February and last until the first of July.  Last year I bought herbs, geraniums, and Shasta daisies in mid-March and didn’t need to drape them with tea towels once during the long, long spring. 

Even though Easter is late this year, we still aren’t sure what to expect, weather-wise.  While we have two little ones in attendance at the family gathering, they are still too young to gather eggs, and we will be happy to avoid that all together.  When I was little it seemed to rain or snow on Easter.  The Easter Bunny hid eggs in the house on those early mornings, and we were fishing dyed eggs out of the couch for weeks.  

I reckon my parents were happy to hide the eggs indoors, but it was just a let-down, you know?  The house still dark from the early hour and the rain, eggs visible from the landing, and no real challenge to any of it.  Easter basket grass is lovely and fairy-like when backlit by an early Easter sun.  It is just kind of messy and matted sitting in a leaning basket on the hearth. 

Easter Sunday was church, and new shoes and something frilly which, in the early 60s meant scratchy and uncomfortable.  There were new gloves, white and cotton or sometimes crocheted.  A dime for the plate inside the glove, worrying my palm with its cool metal antics, moving and sliding as I moved and slung my arm.

Maybe we all came to Sunday school clutching our Annie Armstrong Easter Offering, or maybe we brought it the Sunday before.  In the Southern Baptist church where I grew up, women couldn’t participate much, except in the most womanly and motherly roles.  But the only historical figures of the church every child could name were these:  Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon. 

For some Easter is their favorite holiday. It is certainly the most high holiday of the Christian calendar. I liked the Easter hymns, although they made me shiver a little.  They were joyous and dark all at the same time, and the Easter stories were dramatic and upsetting, and sometimes we had preachers who went too far, pounding for effect on the pulpit as they acted out the nailing to the cross. The stories of all night vigils, betrayal, beatings, and the very word Golgotha terrified me.  That Easter weekend often ended with a TV airing of the “Wizard of Oz” just topped it off. 

But this Sunday we will gather from our various Easter services, watch the boys roll around on the floor, someone will almost step on them, someone else with drop cake on their heads, there will be ham and deviled eggs and mercifully no Easter grass.  

I will fall asleep remembering my Bible lessons, and flying monkeys, and the feel of white cotton gloves, as spotless as they will ever be.