Thanksgiving

For as long as I can remember, we've had three Thanksgiving traditions in my family:  parades, food and football.  How exactly we've fulfilled each of those traditional elements has changed over time.

When I was younger, my brother and I would hold our own "parade" in the halls of our house before the real parade in New York came on TV.  My brother would dress up like an Indian and play a toy drum, I would dress up like a pilgrim and play a toy trumpet, and we'd march about the house.  It's somewhat embarrassing to write about at this point, but evidently my grade depends on it, and a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

In any case, we eventually grew out of holding our own parade, but we still watched the one on TV.  That was around the same time that my brother and I had more traditional Thanksgiving football than what we watched.  Instead of two parades in the morning, we'd watch the parade and play our own game of street football with the neighborhood kids.  Sometimes, if the snow in the yard was real deep, we'd play tackle football in the snow instead.

That changed in 2001, when luck threw a giant twist into my traditional Thanksgiving day parade.  That day I still saw the MACY*S Thanksgiving Day Parade, but not on TV.  I actually got to march in it with the MSU band..  The rest of my family got to watch from the sidewalk.  They were in the very front.  There was a policewoman right there who wouldn't let anyone sit or stand in front of them.  Ten years later, and we all tell stories about that one every time Thanksgiving comes around and the parade goes on TV.

This also threw our tradition of food into some degree of disarray.  Until that year, we'd always had a huge Thanksgiving dinner at our house, but that year, we had a big banquet in a hotel conference room instead.  My parents never had Thanksgiving dinner at their house again.  Instead, we went out to one of the fancy dinners at a hotel.  The MACY*S parade also put an end to the tradition of a pickup football game, but I still watched a game that year in a different hotel conference room where the band crashed after a getting up at 1 AM to rehearse and then get to the staging area, and my family watched on in their hotel room.  After that, we always just watched the games on TV.

Always until this year, that is, when I flew to Florida to see my brother for Thanksgiving.  This year, instead of watching the games, my brother, his roommate and I played Madden for a few hours before dinner.  It goes without saying that I also "went out" even further than usual for Thanksgiving dinner.  The tradition of watching the parade and telling stories about 2001 remains just as it's been for a decade.

Traditions bring our family together.