2 posts tagged “family”
I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season. After hosting Turkey Day and Hanukkah, we've decided to take it easy for Christmas (yes, Indigo is one of those lucky kids that celebrates both). It is really a weird year for us, we still haven't even decorated the tree. That will be tomorrow. We have all the shopping done, but still haven't sent out Christmas cards. Now we need to find a restaurant that will be open on Tuesday that isn't a buffet and won't break our budget. Wish us luck.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday themselves and that all your Christmas dreams come true.
Last night we went to the market to pick up the bird and all the fixings for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Apparently, half the town had the same idea as the store was packed.
This year it’s going to be just five of us at the dinner table, so shopping was not a real chore. But it left me wondering what it must have been like to cook for the whole Frost clan back when we gathered every fall at my Grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.
At Grandma’s house, my cousins and I would play with the same toys my father had as a child. My father with his siblings and their spouses would occupy the living room, chatting and playing cards until inevitably, one or more would succumb to the pleasant nap of a full belly and start snoring on the couch.
Meanwhile, we cousins would race up and down the same halls our parents did in their youth making a thunderous racket of our own. It was only when I was older, that I stopped to look at the chart of the family tree which traced our roots back to the colonists of Jamestown, and appreciated a little of what we had going on as a family.
Those gatherings usually ranged in size from 20 to 30 people. The year when there were 31 of us it included five generations of the Frost family: Grandmother Frost, the five siblings and their spouses, the cousins and their spouses, a few great-grandchildren, and one great great grandchild. Our Thanksgiving gathering this year will have three generations, but two of them will only have one representative.
So why were those family gatherings so much larger? For one thing, we were all located in close orbit, driving distance, around the home of my Grandmother. When my Grandmother moved into a retirement community, the bonds of gravity were broken and the cousins and their families quickly scattered. We now exist in all corners of the United States, parts of Canada, and even Europe.
There is no hope of reuniting yearly for Thanksgiving as we once did. Plus we all have our own families now. Starting our own traditions, made stronger by the family history we bring forward with us.
Still it is sad that distance has weakened the bonds of our extended family. We have all this new technology: social media, blogs, VOIP, but can any of it substitute for the very real memories I have of those large Thanksgiving dinners? What can be done to bring us all back together?
