Incoherent Scribblings

Well, today is Thanksgiving. Yesterday, my good friend and former roommate, Brooke, had her labor induced. I am anxiously awaiting news of how everything went and what she finally decided to name the little bugger. (I do have a baby sampler to stitch after all…) Today, I am mostly thankful that she is finally getting to live her dream of having a baby and hope everything went OK for the two of them.

Otherwise, Thanksgiving Day is pretty quiet on this side of the ocean. Believe it or not, the first year I was here when I called my parents to wish them a happy Thanksgiving, they temporarily forgot that Turkey Day isn’t a holiday all-around the world and asked how Thanksgiving was celebrated here in Germany! Parents… Gotta love ‘em!

In contrast to many Americans, Thanksgiving has always been a fairly relaxed occasion for me. My family is very small (I have one blood aunt and one blood uncle, that’s it) and when I was a kid, all of my family lived in the same town as I did. We never had to travel far and even though we did get together for lunch or dinner on Thanksgiving, it was never a really big production.

The biggest problem I have with Thanksgiving is that I don’t like turkey, pumpkin pie, or cranberry sauce. Period. However, until my grandmother died about ten years ago, we had our own turkey-free tradition. And believe it or not, it was yours-truly who started it.

I spent a lot of time with my grandparents as a kid. They only lived about two blocks away and since my mom worked and I refused to go the babysitter with my sister, I went to Grandma and Grandpa’s almost every day after school. I don’t exactly remember how old I was (probably about seven), but one year, a week or so before Thanksgiving, when my grandma was starting to plan the Thanksgiving menu, I heard her discussing the turkey with my grandpa. Never shy about these sorts of things, I piped up that I didn’t understand why we had to have turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I didn’t like it. Grandma asked me if I had any suggestions for her. Whether or not she was taking me seriously at the time, I don’t know… she was probably expecting me to suggest macaroni and cheese or peanut butter and jelly or something, but she listened. Anyway, I suggested she make fried bread.

You may be asking WTF is fried bread? Well, the name is pretty self-explanatory, I think. My grandma had this recipe for “sweet bread” that she would make into softball-sized buns. But instead of baking them up, she would stretch them thin and fry them up in a skillet. When they were still hot, we would lather them in butter and devour them. I don’t expect you to understand, most people don’t, but everyone in our family loved it when Grandma made fried bread.

So, I suggested instead of turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas, we have fried bread. She told me she wasn’t so sure about that, but would make me a compromise: If everyone else was OK with it, we could have fried bread on one holiday, but had to have turkey on the other. I may have been only seven, but I recognized a good deal when offered, so I agreed. In the next few days, everyone (my mom, dad, sister, grandpa, and uncle) agreed to the “fried bread on one holiday” suggestion. And from then on, we usually had fried bread on Thanksgiving and turkey on Christmas. (I still didn’t like turkey, but would usually eat a sliver of breast meat along with mounds of Grandma’s homemade stuffing.)

After Grandma died, Thanksgiving was really never the same again. Mom tried to make fried bread to keep our tradition alive, but it never really turned out. Then a couple of years later, Mom and Dad got divorced and my sister and I tried to make fried bread for Dad, our new stepmom, and stepsister and while it turned out OK, they didn’t really appreciate it. Finally, I moved far away and didn’t spend Thanksgiving with my family every year anymore. And while the story could have a sad end, I learned last year that my sister made fried bread for Dad, herself, and my then 3 year old niece for Thanksgiving and, in true family tradition, my niece loves Grandma’s recipe for fried bread!

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating it!

Posted on Thursday 25 November 2004 at 14:47 under americana, family matters, holidays & special occasions.
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