Here it comes. It’s coming this way. Every year it comes. Closer and closer now. I sense with dread the impending cling and clang and car door, arguments over guest lists, fear of food failure, horror stories dripping in heavy salt and carbohydrates.
The Holiday Season..............is coming.
Way back in the town of my birth, in the MIddle of the World, our family went every Thanksgiving to my grandparents house on Hampton Place. Always impeccably neat and tidy, the house was a curiosity to me because of its faintly old-fashioned decoration and odd collectibles placed about. I liked the clean, white-painted woodwork and the mysterious, knotty-pine lined bedroom upstairs with built-in and oversized drawers.
Grandma Rose oversaw most of the cooking and seemed to stay in the kitchen long after the rest of us were well into our meal. Voices would rise up to cajole her into joining us, which she would eventually do. Years later when Grandma was unable to host this feast our mom took over and maintained this tradition of staying in the kitchen long after the meal began.
Were prayers or thanks or blessings every given, ideas to the effect of being grateful proffered at the dinner table? Not that I can remember, but a poor memory is one of my strongest features.
I do recall ever so vividly that every single year at meal’s end my Grandpa Saul would grab his old box camera and tell us to face him for a family portrait. He had one of the old-style cameras where one looks down into the viewfinder situated on the camera’s top. His camera had an attached flash. And each year we would wait patiently while Grandpa set up his shot. We waited and waited and then waited some more. Finally, he would push the button on the camera and as surely as the sun would rise the next day, the flash bulb would fail to fire.
Every year we would laugh. Grandpa would try again. Same result. More laughter.
That’s my favorite holiday memory.
