Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON We all have our favorite holidays, and Thanksgiving is close to the top of my list for several reasons. It lasts just one day. Minimal decorations are required. The mood is generally festive, and everyone seems glad to see each other. We all have our Thanksgiving traditions as well, and the Dicksons are pretty entrenched in ours. We have done the same thing for about 30 years and counting. For us, this means a day trip to the home of cousins outside Chapel Hill. The ritual includes a car ride, sometimes with a car full of Thanksgiving attendees, sometimes just a few of us, but always with our complement of food loaded into the back. Tradition has it that as we travel, we sing along to Arlo Guthrie’s long version of “Alice’s Restaurant,” which a Triangle radio station plays every Thanksgiving morning. My cousin and her husband provide the setting, ambiance, turkey and dressing, and everyone else brings everything else. My childhood Thanksgiving tradition was a much more formal occasion at my grandparents’ home in Kinston, including their children and grandchildren, and featuring wonderful Southern food served with formality, including silver, china, and Damask linens. I remember one such celebration when one grandchild from a large and busy household wondered aloud and loudly why there was a “sheet” on his table, but his embarrassed mother quickly scotched that conversation. Our Thanksgivings in Chapel Hill are much more freewheeling. The fi rst one I remember was at my cousin’s fi rst Chapel Hill home, and I arrived with my babe in arms and a diaper bag loaded with all the crucial supplies. My cousin’s 6-year-old daughter, so proud to be a “big girl,” was only too happy to help with the baby. Thanksgivings between then and now have seen the destruction by fi re of that home, a celebration in a rental house, and the construction of their present home, and they have brought together family of all branches. We have celebrated with my cousin’s husband’s Belgian family, my own Austrian family, and one memorable year, with an Ethiopian family who brought and played musical instruments we had never seen and have never seen since. We have celebrated with family members from all branches — immediate family, cousins, with in-laws of several family members, and with what my father called “connections.” He is long gone, so I cannot ask who “connections” actually are, but his defi nition seemed to be in-laws of in-laws, people we certainly know and love but to whom we are clearly not related. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Blessedly, there are also friends, people not related to anyone in our family, but they feel like they are. These include several folks who have joined in on “Alice’s Restaurant” as we drove from Fayetteville, two career educators from the Triangle, and a young man who immigrated at 18 from what was once Yugoslavia. He has since become an American citizen, married a Charlotte girl, and they and their two young daughters are very much a part of our Thanksgiving tradition. We were, and are, glad to see and break bread with one and all. Life, of course, is change, and our Thanksgivings mirror that. It seems like only moments ago that I worried about the three young Dicksons running around in my cousin’s rural setting, perhaps knocking their sweet heads on a Piedmont North Carolina rock outcropping or falling into her lake as they imagined they knew how to canoe. Not to mention the occasional bear or other critter rumored to be loose in rural Orange County. Nowadays, those Precious Jewels and their contemporary young adult cousins and friends have begun their own ancillary Thanksgiving traditions. Running across the dam and canoeing no matter what the temperature are out, and the Turkey Bowl is in. Folks my age are not invited, but our young adults, their spouses, signifi cant others, and assorted chums — the numbers seem to be swelling — assemble sometime before or after Thanksgiving day somewhere in the Triangle area and — what else? — go bowling. Reports are that good times are had by all and then some. One cousin is expecting a baby, and presumably the newly arrived he or she will participate in the Turkey Bowl next Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has become a marker for me, a measure of where we have been and where we are now. The little one for whom I toted the diaper bag to what I remember as our fi rst Chapel Hill Thanksgiving is now a married man about to complete law school. His cousin, once so proud to welcome him and to “help” with the baby is now a mother herself, and she and her husband will accompany — diaper bag in hand, I am sure — their infant son, Luke, to his fi rst Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving family and food are great joys. The memories can be even better. MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com. NOVEMBER 24-30, 2010 UCW 5 THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Thankful for Thanksgiving, Yet Again