Thanksgiving might just be the biggest mixed blessing of a holiday when it come to families.
It’s an opportunity to get together with friends and family members you don’t see at all for the rest of the year. Of course, that can be a mixed blessing, especially if some of your relatives belong to the tribe known as MAGA.
There are actually stages to family Thanksgivings.
First, the extended family gets together and you’re at the kids table.
Second, due to maturing, the passing of older family members and perhaps even the purchase of a bigger table, you graduate to the adults table.
Third, you’ve grown up and you return home as a visitor for Thanksgiving.
Fourth, you bring your family — wife and kids — with you.
Fifth, you don’t travel and you celebrate with your wife and kids at your own home.
That fifth stage includes most of my happiest Thanksgiving. For 10 years or so, my wife, our kids and I had a standard routine for the fourth Thursday in November. We would go to a matinee and see a movie, then in the late afternoon we went to Pasadena and had dinner at our favorite restaurant, Twin Palms.
Twin Palms was a classy restaurant owned by Kevin Costner’s ex-wife. It was a little about our budget for most of the year, but they had a wonderful Thanksgiving buffet that was $35-40 per person. Steep? Maybe, but you could go back for seconds, and when you were ready to leave, you got styrofoam boxes that would holf an entire dinner.
After dinner, we went to another movie.
Nicole, Pauline and Virgile are my three favorite people in the world and there wasn’t one Thanksgiving that wasn’t wonderful. They’re both grown now and working for the Department of State. Virgile and his lovely wife Sterling live in Northern Virginia and work at Foggy Bottom, and Pauline lives with her husband Johnathon and their six-kid blended family in Tunisia.
We haven’t been to Tunisia to visit yet, but we did Thanksgiving in both Jamaica and Guatemala on earlier tours.
That’s the sixth stage. When you’re older and you go visit.
This year is stage seven for us. We didn’t go anywhere and we didn’t fix anything special for dinner.
I don’t like stage seven.