Turkey-Day Dreams

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.  I love the idea of a holiday dedicated to grateful indulgence and the Thanksgiving celebrations I grew up with epitomized the phrase.  You see, most years, my parents and I traveled to the mountains of Northern Kentucky to join what was probably the ultimate orphan-hippie-Thanksgiving-Festival: A gathering hosted by my Aunt in the great room of what used to be a three-room country schoolhouse, wood-burning stoves and all.

A few people would bring ready-made dishes to add to the feast, but most guests would bring whatever ingredients they could come up with and add them to the bounty from my Aunt's garden.  We would spend most of the day in the kitchen, stepping on each other's toes as we laughed, baking bread, finding recipes in worn old cookbooks, and cooking dish after random dish.  When I was too young to do the cooking, my cousins and I would still be put to work braiding the bread loaves, picking flowers to put in vases on the long tables, and cleaning and clearing space for a small town's worth of people to sit and eat and make merry that evening.  Dinner would be served piecemeal, each dish being added to the buffet when it was ready, beginning in the early evening and ending when all the ingredients had been used up.

Often, people would bring instruments or other implements of talent and an impromptu open-mic-night emerged as our evening entertainment.  More often, there would be so many conversations going on at once that you could walk the room and surely find at least one or two topics you felt compelled to discuss. Some years, there would be a crowd large enough that I never quite figured out how many people were there.  Other years, it would just be the extended family, a small few related by blood, but it would still feel as big a crowd as the busy years, such was the size of each person's presence.

The night would begin with everyone holding hands in a circle, intoning, "Aum" and from there, the celebration seemed endless.  There was no "Black Friday" and consumerism the next day. Instead, there was a lot of sleeping in and cleaning by a host of exhausted celebrants still around from the night before. We all cooked the meal together and we all cleaned it up together. We never had the classic Thanksgiving prayers and pageantry but we were more grateful for the food on our table and the company we were keeping than some who do.

I didn't get to go every year and it has been a very long time since these events have taken place.  It has been a long time since my Aunt (my mentor) left this lifetime for her next.

Still, these times were what defined Thanksgiving to me.  Every year, no matter how I'm celebrating the holiday, my mind drifts to Kentucky, to the schoolhouse, to my Aunt, and to the one place and time that I ever felt fully and completely at home.

Those of us who experienced these celebrations growing up will occasionally, wistfully, dream of creating something similar among each other and all of the friends we've picked up along the way. I know I could never re-create the past.  I seriously doubt I have the charisma my Aunt did - the kind of charm that drew people to her, that created the dynamic crowd that made these Thanksgivings the incredible and unusual event that they were. But I do wish...and my wish becomes more urgent as every year of my life without her, without Kentucky, passes by.  Someday. Someday, I dream of continuing the tradition…of giving the orphan-hippie-Thanksgiving-Festival a rebirth.  Someday.