Is it Thanksgiving or Pre Christmas?

By Lisa Brown | Special Columnist to The Bee

When I think back to what I remember the most about Thanksgiving when I was a young girl, I remember early morning drives to Canton to spend the day with my Grandmother and Aunts, Uncles and cousins. My mom and dad and sister and I would travel to “Mee-Maw’s” house, usually arriving just in time to watch a gargantuan turkey being shoved into the oven, filled to the brim with (gasp!) stuffing and slathered inside and out with about two pounds of butter. The cousins played, the women cooked, the men watched football. That’s just the way it was back then, and I suspect in a lot of families it’s still the same way, give or take a few non-stereotypical households. As a child, one of my favorite things to do (you know, while waiting for the peasants to serve me my meal) was to scrupulously go through the special holiday edition JC Penny catalog and circle all the toys that I wanted for Christmas, and that was about as far as things got while we were still in the throes of November.

Thanksgiving (for years and years) was basically a holiday unto itself. A spectacular holiday centered around tremendous amounts of food (and more importantly) thanks. You ate, you felt grateful for your family and appreciative that school was out for a few days. There were no Rankin and Bass cartoons being shown, and if you needed to go to the store and do some shopping, you were out of luck, no stores were open on Thanksgiving, and everyone was home with their loved ones. That’s what Thanksgiving was back then, and it was wonderful. By the time I became a wife and mother things had changed significantly. 

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