Grade school. Junior High. Most of high school. What I remember of Thanksgiving is that it was just the three of us. My mom, my dad, and me.
The first major change to that tradition happened in high school when I started working for what was then The Royal Fork Buffet that later became King's Table Buffet. And Thanksgiving was the holiday of the year at that restaurant.
The hands-down busiest.
We served turkey, of course. Only it was pressed turkey, no bones, that was kind of oval-ish shaped, wrapped in foil. Sort of a ball of meat. It was served at the end of the buffet by the meat carver along with ham and roast beef.
Anyway, one Thanksgiving the power went out in the surrounding neighborhoods except ours.
Or maybe our store had a generator I don't remember. What I do remember is that my parents were without power but they'd started early enough that by the time the outage struck they had most of Thanksgiving dinner on its feet. I'm guessing we had our Thanksgiving dinner for three in the early afternoon before it was time for me to head off to work.
Everyone else, though?
Outta luck.
Thousands who were left with half-cooked turkeys in their ovens. So all those people grabbed their families and came down to our Royal Fork to fulfill their Thanksgiving dinner plans.
It was a solid Plan B, of course. It's just that it was everyone's Plan B and we were straight up swamped. It was one helluva work shift for our crew and it was chaos. There were so many kids, so many families, so many people, here to celebrate Thanksgiving. And what stood out to me was how completely unlike our little family of three Thanksgivings I experienced to this point. What I experienced was quiet. Reflective. Family.
This, on the other hand, was loud, relentless motion.
But it did seem to do the trick. Families got to have their Thanksgiving dinners together in what basically turned out to be an impromptu holiday adventure.
In retrospect, it was a variation writ large on that holiday classic "A Christmas Story" when, on Christmas Day, the neighbor's dogs ruin the family dinner by rushing into their kitchen and eating their turkey. The only restaurant open that day is a Chinese restaurant where they enjoy an entertaining dinner of "Chinese Turkey".
Which would be duck.
In our case, the turkey was actual turkey.
Just, you know, pressed into a convenient ball of meat.
🤨