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Monday, November 15, 2010
What’s your most unusual Thanksgiving meal?
This morning I posted a story about eating out at Thanksgiving, which has become increasingly popular. That brings to mind a fun query:
What is the most unusual/strangest Thanksgiving meal you’ve ever had? Did you ever eat something besides the traditional turkey/stuffing/cranberries/etc?
Or did you ever eat at anyplace off the beaten path? For a number of years, I had Thanksgiving in a garage. Yes, a garage. And here’s a column I wrote about it 11 (yes, 11!) years ago.
When most people think of Thanksgiving, visions of turkeys, pilgrims and pumpkin pie dance in their heads. Myself, I think of garden tools and hardware.
Most people who know me say I have a somewhat, um … offbeat personality. But that lead paragraph above may strike even them as strange. Anyone who knows me knows I am not a creature of the outdoors by any stretch of the imagination. Heck, I spend most of my time away from home in movie theaters.
On top of all that, I don’t believe in manual labor. All it takes for me is about a dozen strokes of the rake, and hey, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll have 20 Diet Cokes and a smile, thank you very much.
So why in the world do I think of garden tools and hardware when I think of Thanksgiving? Simple: because I spent this past Thanksgiving in a garage in Centerville. I can hear the next question: Why in the world did you spend Thanksgiving in a garage in Centerville?
You see, I went to my step grandfather Jerry Schmidts home in Centerville. Jerry has always been the patriarch of the family, if you will, so Thanksgivings have traditionally been at his home. As it happens, he and his wife Sue live in a relatively small house, and the dining room there can fit maybe six people -and that’s after you start squeezing them in.
Now, were talking about a large family gathering of some 20 people or so. Unless we all ate really small servings and/or took turns sitting at the table, the dining room simply would not work. So where does that leave us? Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s garage we go.
I must admit, the idea of eating in a garage wasn’t very appealing for me at first. The garage was heated, and the Ping-Pong table we used seated all of us nicely, so it was practical and all. I just wished I could have more attractive surroundings than a shovel, a rake and an extension cord. I thought about my friend Cathy, and how she was planning on having Thanksgiving under a canopy by the ocean in Florida. I may not be an outdoors man, but wow…now that’s a setting!
But then, I started thinking about it again. Do the surroundings really matter? They sure do, but its not the room that surrounds you that is important. Its the people that surround you who matter. Cathy might have had a beautiful setting, but she was most excited because she was going to get to see her grandmother and aunt for the first time in a long while. I had to think along the same lines.
So what if I was surrounded by a small version of a hardware store? What really mattered was that I was surrounded by members of my family, few of which I get to see very often, but all of which I care about a great deal. So maybe I should revise my opening paragraph like this: When I think of Thanksgiving, I think of garden tools, hardware, and my wonderful friends and family.
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