November 21, 2007
 

Moving Up the Thanksgiving
Food Chain

Thanksgiving.  The favorite holiday.  Not that Turkey Day was always numero uno.  In the tender years of a young boys life, a time when girls, Brussels sprouts and clean underwear seemed over rated, any holiday was synonymous with a day wasted.  

On holidays one was unreasonably required to spend every waking moment with family, i.e. cousins.  All were girls save one, and he lived a life of total hardship on a on a farm devoid of ball gloves, basketball hoops or footballs.  And it was the same barren, ball less landscape awaiting on grandparent visitation.  This total absence of life’s necessities meant holidays were endured not enjoyed by the twelve and under set.  Any holiday gathering of clan Maynard was a day filled with “no you can’t go to the schoolyard and shoot baskets”, “no you can’t go over to your friend Ron’s house and see what he’s doing because today is a family day” and “if you don’t quit teasing the girls by threatening to put their dolls down the garbage disposal you’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon, all alone, in the spare bedroom.”  In the lives of young boys, there wasn’t a holiday capable of moving the needle on life’s fun meter. 

But Thanksgiving, by the narrowest of margins, was the best of the bunch.  At least the Detroit Lions battled the Green Bay Packers in the Motor City cold every Turkey Day morning followed by Texas A&M playing somebody in the afternoon.  The Aggies opponent didn’t really matter, growing up a child in the Heartland caused Texas to be felt a foreign country much like Canada or Mississippi, but football on the tube made time pass a little more quickly as the  adults surrendered to the tryptophan and napped away the turkey dinner. 

But it was also Thanksgiving, the first of the fall/winter family gatherings that heralded the advent of adulthood.  While other religions celebrate bar mitzvahs and first communion as evidence of coming of age, midwestern wasps (white, Anglo-Saxon protestants) suffer a dearth of religious events celebrating a promotion to puberty.  Protestants are reduced to using Thanksgiving as the barometer in life’s aging process.  

It was indeed a satisfying moment when an invitation was issued to dine elbow to elbow with the adults at the Thanksgiving meal, leaving behind those juveniles, the cousins, at the adjacent “kids” table.  Finally, one could relish having broken through the oh so binding chains of childhood.  

Only recently did reality hit with the awareness that the number of chairs at the Thanksgiving table was unchanging.  An “adult” seat only became available when a family member passed through this vale of tears, or as Gail Sheehy so delicately phrased going toes up, suffered a “life accident.”  This natural progression, the old giving way to the young, was more easily accepted when one was on the receiving end of life’s chain. 

But today, guess the family seniority leader?  All of a sudden when the grandsquirts start asking about a promotion to the adult table, it’s actually my chair they’re eyeballing.  

Why would my wife deem strange my thinking the ideal gift for our daughters, and families, would be an additional leaf for their dining room table plus several new chairs.  Just possibly a little advance planning would insure a seat at the holiday table for years to come.  Well, it made sense to me.