Thanksgiving.......

The passing of the Torch

I cooked my first Thanksgiving turkey in 1975. I had recently acquired a Weber kettle, was anxious to try it out in the "indirect" mode, so I volunteered to cook the bird for that years' family meal. It turned out so much more moist and tender than any turkey that I'd ever tasted.....(my apologies to my mother, who really was a good cook) that I became hooked.

When my Dad retired my folks moved to southern Indiana ,near where my Mother grew up. This was in 1981. They came back to visit every Christmas and I held our family get togethers and dinners at my place.........thus it was that the task of holiday cooking came to be primarily my responsibility.

As a railroader, I had no holidays........period. There were 6 paid holidays in each year, but all that meant was that if you worked on those days you got an extra days pay...you didn't arbitrarily get the day off.....class one railroads don't shut down for anything except natural disasters and accidents. If you wanted a day off, you had to "mark off" and eat the loss of pay. Insofar as Christmas is a kind of "one-shot" deal.....particularly with children (how do you tell a child that Santa Claus doesn't come to railroaders' houses until the day after Christmas?), I always took time off for that event. In the event of Thanksgiving and birthday celebrations, however, we scheduled meals and parties for the next convenient day after the arbitrary date for everyone to get together and for me to cook.

This coupled with new realities that have evolved over the course of the past two or three years have wrought some significant changes in the way our family deals with holiday meals and get-togethers in general.

Thus it has come to pass that we have been gathering at Casey's outpost for most of these events......as chronicled here and in Cooking With Gutz.

I didn't know what was going to transpire for Thanksgiving this year.........and I was preparing myself for the prospect of having it just kind of fade out. I assumed that Casey and his family would gather with his fiancee's family and that Cassie and Cheyenne would hold forth at her Mother's.

So, it was a pleasant surprise when Casey called, shortly before Thanksgiving, and told me that he was planning to have a meal at his house on the Saturday following the holiday and that he was going to do the cooking. All he needed were some recipes, a little help with the grocery list, and some technical/how-to advice on things like the ingredients, timing, equipment and preparation for the stuffing and the cranberry salad.

We worked out a plan, Casey laid in the supplies and did some of the advance work (like laying out the bread to dry and defrosting the bird) and I showed up at a comfortable hour on the appointed day with a few items that we would need and a couple of salads that I threw together the night before in a bit less than 2 hrs. Cassie and Cheyenne arrived later in the day and pitched in with some of the, intermediate clean up and last minute chores like potato mashing. Diane had prepared nibblers and munchies and dips to keep up our strength. It being a first time effort, there were some clashes in style, a bit of mis-timing, and other minor glitches............there was a time or two that Casey and I must have looked like Stan and Ollie as we worked around each other, but all in all it went swimmingly. Everyone got to take an occasional break, we all took turns with aspects of kid-tending and herding and we all sat down to a gorgeous groaning board that would have done the pilgrims proud within a tolerable margin of the target hour.

My only real regret is the lack of pictures of the event to post here....my camera got put in a kid safe place in the unpacking process and I assumed that I had just forgotten to bring it. By the time I found it, the meal was over and we were half way through the clean up. No one thought to get a picture of the loaded table before we lit into it. This was Casey and Diane's first Boze holiday table....primarily hosted and provided by them as a couple.......and it's a shame that there is no picture of it.These words and all our memories are going to have to suffice as a rememberance.

The significance of this is that the "torch has been passed" in our family. I've got a way to go before full "retirement", but things are changing into what they will be and it pleases me that my son and daughter are stepping into the roles that I have held for so many years......They are not "kids" any more.

We are starting to talk about Christmas, orchestrating where we all need to be and what we can do to contribute. Again, Casey and Diane are going to be host and hostess and chief cooks and bottle washers. Cassie and I will do what we can to help and contribute and distribute the load of effort so as to allow everyone time to enjoy family before during and after the meal. It really is a big adjustment for me to relax and let someone else handle it, .........but I think I'm up to the challenge.......*grins*.

A big, proud, Captn Dad's thank you and well done to Casey and Diane.....

In other news.....

Cooking With Gutz has come out of its hiatus (coma)with a new posting......hopefully to be followed with some recipes and tips that you can use for the upcoming Holiday season. Enjoy!

Thus endeth the entry......