Thanksgiving Traditions

Here we are again at another holiday time already.  Can you believe it is Thanksgiving already? Where did the year go? Our family has had so many traditions over the years (from when I was a small child) that it just becomes...well... a bit silly. I begun writing down some of these things in this blog so that my children...and maybe one day grandchildren would know about how it all began. And how goofy this whole family is. Okay maybe goofy really describes just me.

I looked over my old blogs to see what I wrote about Thanksgiving before and realized there was only one post.  If you would like to re-read it: http://etsthisibelieve.blogspot.com/2011/11/feathered-beast-feast.html

Thanksgiving is sort of a trial run before Christmas on all the food and festivities. Over the years we have morphed some of the traditions to better fit our own family and also what tools we have to make dinner with.  It is kind of like the story about the granddaughter was preparing a ham for dinner and they were following all the ingredients to cook a ham and had all the things in place but one odd fact about the traditional recipe was a big chuck of the ham was cut off.....why was that? The granddaughter called her mother and asked her about this recipe and what was she supposed to do with this chunk of ham that was cut off and why was it cut off.  The mother simply responded that she didn't know.....she just always did it because grandma did it for all those years.  So the mother called her mother, the grandma, and asked her why did we always cut off a chunk of the ham.  All the ingredients were followed and the tradition was to cut off a piece of the ham.  The grandmother just laughed and said, no silly that wasn't a tradition.....that was because that was the largest roasting pan we had so I had to cut a piece off for it to fit!  Traditions....how they began.

The Thompson Cranberry Salad started long ago but I believe that our family cannot truly take credit for it. I know I added "Thompson" in front of it so we would clarify that it wasn't just any ordinary cranberry salad. Story goes that many years ago my great grandparents had worked for a wealthy family during the depression and it was one of their favorite holiday dishes.....not as exciting as "bringing it over from the ol' country". My oldest son said, "You mean we stole our family tradition from someone else...that sounds like our family." But we have made it special by never making any other time but Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. The process has become a tradition, no one but "family" gets the recipe.  Everyone else calls it "PINK STUFF". Cutting the grapes, which takes hours, has become a sort of indoctrination into the family. We don't have the big grinder my mother had so we need to improvise on some of the kitchen tools. Most of the time this is always done the evening before.

My father was always the creative individual who made up stuff all the time. I guess that is where I get it from. I should mention that he was also the goofiest person I ever knew as well.  I guess that is where I get THAT from too. I miss him during these times. Just wish my kids could have met him. One of the "after products" of making the cranberry salad is when we drain the ground cranberries.  It produces a very sweet syrup that as a young child we had always tossed it out (best I can remember) just too sweet to do anything else with it. My father, one time decided to mix in some soda with it. 7UP to be exact. It produced the famous cranberry drink we have with the meal.  Unfortunately it was usually only one glass because there was only some much to go around.

Typically the tried and true method of mixing the liquids is to slowly pour it into a separate pitcher.  However, if you don't drink it all you cannot save it because the soda will loose it's fizz. We have tried many different methods of mixing the drink over the years such as pouring the cranberry syrup into the soda bottle.....that produces a pink volcano!  we have also switched to diet 7UP due to all us diabetics in the family.....save a few calories.

Another one is the Party Mix. Not sure when this began but it is a spin off of the Chex Party Mix. The Thompson's of course make a bit of their own modifications to the ingredients one being Honeycombs. Mostly it is the assortment of cereals that are on the box but some additives. Other have chosen to add some of their own favorite cereals, but I stick with the original mix that Dad always made. Sometimes this doesn't get made just due to the shear size of all the food stuff we make. This year we forgot. So maybe we will make it in between the two holidays to keep up with some snacks.

This year the new tradition is heading out for a run on Thanksgiving Day morning.  My wife and I will be doing a 10K Turkey Trot. After all we need to burn off a few calories before the big meal. Is was a nice brisk run but we accomplished it. I did it just a few seconds over one hour....need to work on my time! This may end up not being an entire family thing but our daughter-in-law ran it with us this year too.

Enjoy your day and watch for some more posts on our traditions during the holidays.