The Night before Thanksgiving, when all through the house....

Today is the day before Thanksgiving, and as has been the case for many years, I am getting ready to make the food I will be taking to share to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I think I have only had one Thanksgiving dinner at my own home in all the years I have had a home of my own, but that is all right with me; I don’t mind packing it up to take along.

This year, as for the past few, I will be making homemade mashed potatoes with Asiago shredded cheese, sour cream and green onions, and two quarts of fresh cranberry relish (never the goo in a jar).

And also this year, I am acutely missing my parents, Paul and Betty Cady. My father passed away on Dec. 28, 1993 (after hanging on, I have always been sure, so as not to ruin our Christmas that year). My mother died on Dec. 9, 2003. Losing both of my parents in December has transformed that month, which for me, has always been the most eventful of the year, heightened by the fact that two of my three children were born in December: Brian, on December 23, and Rachel, on December 18 (My son Nick was born on March 10). The two December births added emotional intensity to the month that always was the most spiritual and emotional month for me, because never has there been any other child who loved and believed and anticipated Santa Claus as much as I did. I quite literally could not sleep for weeks before Christmas in eager anticipation of the Christmas Eve visit from the jolly old elf, who I always hoped would bring me a myriad of miniature kitchen appliances and, with any luck, a baby doll hopefully dressed in pajamas or maybe, if I were really, really good, a Ginny doll with brown hair like my own. One particularly spectacular year, there was a play kitchen made of formed tin with a tiny, precious little silver plastic faucet that turned back and forth on its base, with working cupboard drawers and tiny elfin silverware made of silver plastic that nestled next to tiny tin plates.

Despite my parents’ passing, I still look forward to Thanksgiving dinner with family, even though the family that I celebrate it with is quite different now; we have my one son and his wife and their four children for the first time this year in a few years, since he no longer has to work on Thanksgiving, and my other son will be coming home as he always does, to join us for the day, along with my husband and my daughter. This year, as we have since my mother died, our only meal will be at my in-laws’ home, and we go only there without having to switch homes. However, the beautiful and meaningful traditions of thanks do not exist there, which is the thing I most mourn about the day; the loss of that taking of time for the ceremony of thanks.

This has made me examine the idea of rituals: do we need them? Yes, I think so. Sometimes we need to take stock of the things that we still have, and be thankful for them. There is a Cat Stevens song about that: “I’m Being Followed By A Moonshadow,” in which he ponders: “if I ever lose my hands, lose my plow, lose my land, Oh if I ever lose my hands, Oh if.... I won't have to work no more...What if I should lose my mouth? All my teeth, north and south? What if I should lose my mouth? Oh, well, I won’t have to talk no more.” There have been more than several years when one of us lost a job; Thanksgiving forced us to remind ourselves that despite that loss, there are still things to be thankful for.

My parents, and particularly my mother, made sure that there was a thanks ceremony; the good china, the silver, the Heisey goblets, and the white damask tablecloth, with candlesticks and candles that she could never bring herself to burn. In the last years before Mom died in 2003, when by then the five Cady children had expanded to 8 grandchildren and 5 husbands and wives, each of us had to sit down, be quiet, and go around the table as all 20 (plus a visitor or two) of us held hands and shared what we were each most thankful for. Every year, every person’s story was a little different: a new baby, a new job, a renewed perspective on the value of still having our loved ones, or just the chance to be together as a family once again. Then she led the family in a heartfelt prayer that came, always, from her heart. Before we began to eat, my father liked to lead us in a toast to family in his rich, wonderful, deep Welsh voice, the children with sparkling grape juice or cider to hold up in wine glasses, the rest of us with a glass of wine, and ever the emotional family man, he would inevitably get too emotional to finish it. The food was passed formally, hand to hand, placed in our best china bowls and platters. No one ate before my mother sat down, and after she had led us all in grace, the meal began, with all of us reminded of the most important thing in life: Family.