Thanksgiving is all about Families

the table is set...

As we get ready to gather this week with family members for Thanksgiving we have a great opportunity to gather stories from our family members. Let your family know that questions will be asked about them and other family members. By giving them a heads up, you are giving them time to think about their answers and the more time, the better the stories might be.

If you can prepare a list of questions for family members and family members prepared to ask a question that they always wanted to know there family is great. Have the children prepare the first questions so they have a vested interest in hearing the answer. If this becomes a tradition, it will let all the generations of the family share in the future story telling.

I know that many of you will be juggling cooking, eating on time, watching football as well as shuttle driving family members that no longer drive and trying to create the perfect day for your family members. Here I am asking you to take on one more task but I do believe this is more important than eating. Okay, not desert. Desert might be the perfect time to bring out the tape recorder, video camera and or regular camera to capture the new memories as the old ones are being discussed.

I grew up with Ossie and Harriet and My Father Knows Best on television, which showed the lives of these perfect families. I only realized as a young adult that most other families were not this perfect. It was an ideal that made me wonder about my own family. Not all families behave perfectly at Thanksgiving either so this questioning project made be riddled with land mines. You know your family and need to really try to manage it if it gets too emotional. It might be just the answer to connect everyone.

One of my favorite holiday movies and the only Thanksgiving movie that I know of is Home for the Holidays, directed by Jodi Foster starring Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning. The family loves each other in a dysfunctional way but they cannot even make through one meal with throwing barbs at each other figuratively and actually. My family was never quite like this but we all did have issues with each other lying just beneath the surface. It is nice to know not every family lived in the perfect home of the Nelson’s from television. In one of the last scenes of the movie Charles Durnings character laments that the family will all be together once again in four weeks for Christmas. And so it goes with families.

Last week an article ran in the New York Times call Duck! It’s the Holidays with this link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/garden/19manners.html?scp=1&sq=Duck! It’s the Holidays&st=cse
Again, this story describes some not so perfect gatherings for Thanksgiving.

I give you these examples that somewhere between these examples is where your family lives. It is the perfection that we are trying to create that is hard or nearly impossible task to achieve. So where ever your family is on the spectrum of imperfection it those stories what ever they are or how ever bad they are, they are no different then everyone else’s’ families. it is okay to write and remember them. And maybe writing about them helps with healing.

Family Questions:
1. How did we get or chose to live in this area?
2. What were the lives like of the first in our family to live in this area?
3. How long and who were the first relatives to live in this area?
4. Does anyone know about these people?
5. Are there any family members that moved to an area and that we have lost contact with?
6. Kids questions: If Grandma and Grandpa are the oldest family members have them talk about what it was like when they were young? It can be Great-Grandma or Grandpa or a Great Uncle? Usually the oldest family member that can be asked about it.
a. Did you celebrate thanksgiving when you were young?(not a holiday until1941)

b. What kind of foods did you eat?
c. Did people bring foods to the dinner?
d. What time did you eat the Thanksgiving Meal and why that time? Do you still eat at that time now and why?
e. What is your favorite holiday?
f. What is your wish for this family?
g. What are you thankful for this year?

Hope these questions get the conversation started. Your family members may have much better questions and the members of your family may have great stories to match.
Enjoy the holidays with those you love and perfection is goal and it is in our imperfections that the great stories fly.

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