Remembering Thanksgiving over the years

Thanksgiving is a day for family memories.
Memories like:
•The years when the Ronald family gathering in Richmond was so big it had to be held in a church fellowship hall.
•Moving up from the kids’ table to the grown-ups’ table.
•Afternoon football between Washington and Dallas.
•The year a cousin’s wife complained, “Your family doesn’t have conversations. They just tell stories.” (There was some truth in that.)
•The year when Connie and I were dating that someone suggested a group photo and a tactless aunt suggested that she not be included in the picture because she wasn’t part of the family. (After 43 years of marriage, my guess is she’d relent today.)
•The year Sally and I bought a football-shaped summer sausage to take to Thanksgiving dinner. A football would have tasted better than the sausage did.
•A fuzzily-remembered year when Uncle Jim decided that the family dinner should be combined with a wine tasting.
•A year when we traveled to Illinois to spend the holiday with my wife’s family and I had to adjust to an entirely new set of family traditions.
•Two years when we made the trip up to New York State to Connie’s family homestead, dealing with heavy snow, rented cars and a house that was bulging at the seams. And no football game.
•The year my mother invited a former patient from Richmond State Mental Hospital to the family gathering. Mom had worked as a “Gold Lady” volunteer and had befriended the recently-released patient. It was the same year that my sister, a child psychologist, invited a troubled young teenager. I’ve often wondered what they made of all the laughter and teasing around the dining room table.
•Years when the weather was mild and we’d take a post-turkey hike from my sister Linda’s house down through the ravine to a waterfall. It was a great way to work off the meal and get some fresh air.
•The first year my wife prepared one of the main courses, the Thanksgiving ham, only to be kidded about it by my father, who pretended it was “a little dry.”
•A couple dozen years of writing Thanksgiving columns, wondering how badly I was recycling old material while still recognizing that the old memories are still worth sharing.
•Tasting new dishes and returning to old favorites.
•Meeting international college students who had been invited by my brother-in-law who was a professor and knew the kids had no local family to be with on Thanksgiving.
•Taking extra copies of the Wednesday paper along to share with family.
•Consciously taking a few extra moments to be thankful for all these memories.