Well, a rolling stone gathers no moss, right? I never totally understood that expression, by the way. Moss is bad, is what it's saying? Or is it more like, slow down, gather ye moss while ye may, to cushion your hard, stony sides for the trek down the hill?

At any rate, I'M not getting any moss on me this month, because Nick and I are off again. This time to Virginia, to visit family for Thanksgiving. Every year, Nick's whole extended family gathers at The Homestead, a lovely, old-fashioned resort in the Appalachian mountains.This gathering is not optional. It's a command performance. So we go, and the good thing about it is that The Homestead is about two hours from where I grew up. So my family will come up, probably the day after Thanksgiving, and we'll go for a hike and a picnic, and I'll get to see them.

It's funny how traditions change over the years. You have to be adaptable, because life changes; obviously I wasn't going to be spending every single Thanksgiving making Broccoli Rice Casserole (whose name totally leaves out the most important ingredient: Cheez Whiz) with my little sister and cranberry bread with my mother.

In fact, it's been years since we had that kind of holiday, at home at my parents' house in Virginia. For a while, we went to my dad's sister's farm in Illinois, where we celebrated with approximately 30 midwesterners and had many casseroles much more disgusting than our old favorite with the Cheez Whiz. And now there's Nick's family to consider, and our new tradition, which involves no home-cooked dishes of any kind, casserole or not. The food at The Homestead is wonderful, and very much in the southern tradition, but the pumpkin pie is out of a can. My mother never uses canned pumpkin. And the turkey is oven roasted; my daddy used to smoke our turkey on the grill. And I find I really miss the Broccoli Rice Casserole--not so much eating it, but making it with my sister. It makes me think about how influential the childhood years can be, that twenty-some years and many new traditions later, I still identify Thanksgiving most strongly with those elements from the holidays of my earliest childhood.

What are some of your favorite Thanksgiving memories? And are they all tied up with food, the way mine seem to be?

Posted by Louisa Edwards at 8:52 AM