Brett Alan’s Favorite Thankgiving Memory

I have been blessed with some incredible memories of Thanksgiving.  I can probably count on one hand how many times the entire family has not been together.  However, there was one year that we were all together but were still missing one key ingredient at our table.

Our family is a board game kind of family.  For most of my childhood that's what Sundays were meant for.  We'd get up and go to church, then we'd go and get some donuts and come home and start playing board games.  It's one of my best memories.

So there wasn't anything out of the ordinary to start playing a game on Thanksgiving as we waited for our dinner.

This year, the game was Family Feud.  I remember it very clearly.  We got up and watched the parade like we did every other year.  Dad hopped in the car to go pick my grandma up and we sat there literally breaking bread apart to put in the stuffing.

When dad got home with grandma, we started to play.  Dinner was at 3 and it was only around 11 so we had plenty of time.  We picked our teams and it was on.  Mom made some holiday cocktails that they had never had before called Sicilian Kisses.  None of us kids were old enough to drink and my grandma didn't drink so it was just mom and dad with their blender.

That was the funnest game ever!  I had never heard my dad giggle like he did that day.  As he shouted out answers, and mom made another blender of drinks, we all started to talk about dinner.  We were starting to get hungry now.

It was around 2 o'clock and mysteriously, the aroma that we were so used to on Thanksgiving day still had not shown up.  That's about when it dawned on my mom that she didn't put the turkey in! Turkeys take hours to cook.  It's not something you can just warm up.  It takes hours!

Needless to say, we were having so much fun together as a family that we totally forgot about dinner.  Kind of strange that the thing most people associate with Thanksgiving (the turkey), didn't matter in the big picture.  We were all together and truly enjoying each other's company and it is still my favorite Thanksgiving memory.  No one really cared that we didn't eat until like 8 o'clock that day.  We were just thankful to have each other.  Well...everybody but grandma.  She still wanted her turkey!  :)

[Photo courtesy of Flickr.com user letouj]