Happy Thanksgiving 2012

Thanksgivings conjure up all sorts of memories of holidays past.

My earliest recalls are at a farm in Chepatchet, Rhode Island.
My 7 cousins and their parents lived there and we always seemed to spend
Thanksgiving Day with my Mom and Dad, Uncle Ben and Aunt Audrey, Uncle Bob and Aunt Grace and the 3 families of children totaling 16.

It seems fitting to celebrate this holiday on a farm. A day of cooking and preparing meats and vegetables for a warm evening feast. As the children, we would roam the farm; feeding the chickens, running with the dogs, playing hide and seek in the barn and having all kinds of fun. Meanwhile, the moms and dads toasted the day while gathered around the hearth and the turkey in the kitchen.

As the sun went down, we would sit around a large farm house table passing the turkey, stuffing, summer squash and peas and loving my grandmother Riley's left-handed potatoes. Everyone had a part in Aunt Audrey's kitchen and it all seemed to go off without a hitch.

The cousins all loved apple pie but there seemed to be pecan and mince as well. They served the pie with ice cream and my dad always like coffee ice cream with his pie.. After dessert my uncles, Bob and Ben sometimes known as Bad and Worse, would get out their banjos and start singing and playing with all of us..It was a great time and we would laugh and sing some of their old songs or just hum along if we didn't know the words.. It was sort of the grand finale to the holiday..

At that time the television was limited to one room in the home and they probably also had one wall phone.. So there was no technology; no cell phone distractions, no television football bonanzas.. AND everyone was talking, laughing and conveying.. Happy times they were..I remember listening to a lot of stories and lively discussions of their past and Thanksgiving Days of long ago.

In later years as we all grew to teens, Uncle Ben sold the farm and moved to Florida to retire with Aunt Audrey.. We had held Thanksgiving a few times with everyone in suburbia but it never seemed to have the same feeling of being away from it all, out on a farm..

I went to college in Burlington, Vermont and once I graduated, I moved and worked in NYC.
Working in the city made me realize how much I missed the farms and the mountains, so we restarted that tradition of Thanksgiving on the farm. We are now in our 34th year of celebrating Thanksgiving here and it seems fitting since most of the food we eat, celebrate and are grateful for originates here in places like Vermont..

Thanksgivings conjure up all sorts of memories of days gone by. 

I am happy to spend a day of thanks and gratitude with my husband and children right here on a farm

looking to a future of more people appreciating each other, communicating more and spending more family time together. 

This is an important American holiday which helps all of us get through the dark cold winter and bring light to the rest of the world on how important it is to give thanks..