For a family filled with great cooks, it shouldn’t surprise you that Thanksgiving is a much-anticipated holiday for us.  My aunt Judy used to host the event every year at her house in Charlotte.  She made the turkey; it was provided by my uncle who owned a poultry business.  It gave him access to the freshest, heritage turkeys.  Aunt Judy also made the stuffing.  There were two kinds – one cooked in the bird, one cooked in a pan alongside it.  Both are heavy with Neese’s sausage, wild mushrooms and thyme.  Everyone knows if you want to get the stuffing cooked in the bird, you’d better line up early.  Some years, making sure you get some even meant jockeying to get near the front of the line with the children.  The rest of us in the family would supply the myriad sides.  There are the usual suspects, of course; sweet potatoes loaded with maple syrup, green bean casserole, homemade rolls and biscuits packed with a year’s worth of butter.  There’s always a host of desserts laying on the buffet, all just waiting for you once you’ve had your fill of the savories.  There’s coconut layer cake and mincemeat and pumpkin pies.  When it comes time for Aunt Judy to serve the desserts, a great many of us simply ask for “an Aunt Ann platter.”  Now that aunt Ann, is my mom.  Many years ago, she set the standard for dessert orders by asking for a piece of EVERY dessert to be put on her plate.    

  Oh, there are culinary misses from time to time like one year’s green bean fiasco in which my aunt used a heavy hand with vinegar.  Some years the pumpkin pie is a bit under-baked, thanks to my sister’s boys handling the task these days.  Even with the occasional misses, the food had us coming back year after year with our mouths watering to Aunt Judy’s on Thanksgiving Day. 

  But it’s more than the food when I think about it.  A lot more.  I really recalled that several years ago when Benji started asking AROUND HALLOWEEN every single day “are we going to Aunt Judy’s now?”  You see, he was looking forward to Thanksgiving with great expectation.  And I realized something the other day.  Here was a kid that was far happier munching upon McDonald’s chicken nuggets than he was eating steak or any other delicacy for that matter.  Ben wasn’t really looking forward to the food.  Benjamin yearned to be with Alex and Taylor, his two first cousins and his other relatives. 

  As I thought about Thanksgiving Day this week, I began to imagine my life 40 years from now should the good Lord bless me with that many more.  I began to wonder what life would be like if the only thing I remembered from Thanksgiving was the food.  If all I remembered 40 years from now was the turkey or the stuffing or the casseroles or the pies, my life would be far bleaker, wouldn’t it?  Gone would be the comfort of smiling and laughing with aunts and uncles, parents and cousins.  Gone would be the remembrance of the many kindnesses shown and shared with this particular group of people.  At 80, I hope to remember the vanilla-spiked whipped cream and the lush dark meat of the turkey, but I pray to remember and be thankful for all of those wonderful people.  The specialness of Thanksgiving isn’t so much about the goodness of the food they brought as it is about the people themselves; who they were and what they mean to me. 

  As we get nearer and nearer to Thursday, it’s my ongoing prayer that we remember a particular God as we gather together.  And I say that for a reason. 

  Years ago, I was looking for a good Thanksgiving book to read to Benjamin for Thanksgiving when I discovered something both understandable and yet at the same time disappointing.  Here I was skimming through these children’s books, simply looking for Thanksgivings lifted up to God.  And yet over and over again what I found were these books having children and adults be thankful without a single mention of whom they’re thankful to.  No God was mentioned at all.  I finally found one books that did, at least, mention God.  And while that was a vast improvement over its God-neutered peers, thanks weren’t offered to a particular God.  It was instead offered to that fuzzy, generic god which so often stands in place for us in America when we want the trappings of divinity without the mess of Scripture or judgment, or sanctification or much less Jesus Christ.  So, in a way, it fell short of the mark too.