11.24- A North Texas Thanksgiving

 11.24-

A North Texas Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 22 is coming together for us with one big change being that Sheila is directing the tradition from heaven now with our friend Jesus making sure everything is okay. Our kids, grandkids and cousins are coming together to celebrate our new normal life.

Life without a family of love sounds extremely painful to me. I have had times when I was rebellious and didn’t want to live according to our family standards of grace, mercy and forgiveness. I would just run away and live my own life without being bothered by their opinions. Something would come into my mind that I would miss the love of my family that I absorbed on our best days together.

Thanksgiving had the effect of drawing me back into love instead of isolation.

Mom and dad worked at raising, chickens, hogs and cattle along with a big garden with potatoes, onions, radishes, tomatoes, purple hull peas, green beans, pickles, watermelons and cantaloupe to name a few.

Mom and dad both evolved over time into working in the grocery store and meat market so Thanksgiving week was big and busy for Collins Piggly Wiggly and Jesse Smith Grocery. During the week they would see almost all of their 100’s of friends buying groceries and getting ready for their own Thanksgiving celebration. Like farming, grocery store work didn’t yield an immediate financial reward, but a great deal of satisfaction in their work. Their satisfaction was helping themselves and others to have plenty of healthy, fresh food on this wonderful holiday.

Mom and dad by working in the store could shop sales and pick good cuts of meat. They enjoyed bringing groceries to family and friends who didn’t have too much money and resources for their holidays.

Our table almost always included turkey and dressing and giblet gravy as well as ham and mashed potatoes, green bean and mushroom soup casserole, jello salad, garden salad, rolls, cranberry sauce and asparagus and fruit salad.

Our family didn’t always have everyone there due to other commitments but when all were there we had the Bill Luttrells from Abilene, the Reed Wishards from Greenville, the Bill Wishards from Abilene and the Larry Wishards from Denver.

The night before mom would have the turkey cooking all night and there was this smell that pervaded the entire house when we woke up. A bit later dad would be cutting up the fruit for fruit salad and carving the bird.

Some of the kids and adults sleeping in and early risers eating breakfast or headed out to hunt rabbits or play football.

Those awake would be watching Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade. About 1 pm the dinning room table would be totally loaded so there was hardly room for the eating plates. There was table setting for eight at one table and six at another and then card tables for the rest. Dad would call everyone’s attention to have prayer to God for the Thanksgiving Blessing. What a sight that was with twenty or thirty people filling up his little kitchen and dining room.

We had been blessed at that time in that we had only lost people in our family who were over seventy years old. We knew nothing at the time of the loss of young ones. We were blessed.

These were all together in spite of being very different in personality and temperament. Some were loud and others less loud. A bunch of “performers” and more watchers. laughers and observers. Men and women, young and old, city folks and country folks from attending big well organized churches and some where the church would never be accused of organized religion.

All came together based on the ability of a family to extend forgiveness to all in the way they had been forgiven by God. These were all reconciled to God and reconciled to each other. That is the only way we could come together. We had all failed to be perfect people and our common thread was the need for grace and space. Unity in being thankful for our country of freedom of religion and worship and freedom to work and succeed or fail and be helped by others to try again.

In the afterenoon we would watch the Dallas Cowboys with the quarterback issues from Eddie Lebaron, to Don Meredith, to Roger Staubach and Craig Morton, to Danny White.

In the evening after the football games on television and in the front yard we would eat leftover turkey and dressing. Then play 42 until bedtime with a last dish of ice cream watching late night television.

I would go to sleep thinking what a family to be a part of. I am a part of something pretty special. So thankful I didn’t run way from this great, loving family and isolate myself from this big family of love.

A North Texas Thanksgiving Memory.

Larry Wishard

11.22.22