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Rookie Mom

Thanksgiving can count amid rush

By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH
Published November 20, 2005

The way the retailers start promoting Christmas the very day after Halloween, it seems Thanksgiving is getting lost in the commotion. For some it's almost in the way, just something we have to get behind us in order to really start the Christmas season.

But there are ways families can put more excitement into Thanksgiving. After all, since there are no presents, last-minute letters to Santa or cookies to decorate, it really is a time for children to enjoy being with family members without the distractions of Christmas. But face it. Most kids are never going to enjoy a big meal of turkey and stuffing as much as getting presents at Christmas or Hanukkah.

Still, you can do things to make Thanksgiving Day more than a time to eat and watch football.

Kristen Bishop of St. Petersburg ended up touching a pig at a farm in Ohio on Thanksgiving last year. That was just one of the tasks she had to be photographed doing for a family scavenger hunt.

Her whole extended family divides into two teams, and whoever hosts the meal that year also comes up with a list of things they have to do and prove they did them with a photo.

"We've done it the last seven to 10 years now," she said. "It's a blast, and the pictures are hilarious. One year we had to get a picture of everyone on our team standing in someone's bathtub. We went to a total stranger's house and asked if we could stand in their bathtub."

Another year they had to find a wishbone from a turkey. Bishop still has visions of her aunts digging through people's garbage. And she loves the picture of half her family going down a slide together at a playground.

My husband's family has a longstanding tradition of each person around the table reading or reciting something that has special meaning.

When he was in a middle school production of the play Our Town, he recited one of the most poignant parts of Thornton Wilder's masterpiece. Emily, who died at age 26, has been allowed to come back and relive one day on earth. She chooses her 12th birthday and, as the stage manager reminds her that she must soon go back to the cemetery up on the hill, she asks him a question:

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it - every, every minute?" The stage manager answers, "No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some."

Last year my daughter, who was 5 at the time, recited a poem about the moon that she had learned in school. My older daughter read a story she had written about a rhinoceros.

Of course, not everybody comes up with something moving, creative or funny every year. There's always one or two of us in the den racing through Bartlett's Familiar Quotations five minutes before we sit down to eat, but that's also part of the tradition.

I know of other families who make it a tradition to help out at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter during the Thanksgiving weekend. Others make it a day for marathon Monopoly games.

Food, of course, is a big part of the day. Kids can be more involved by helping make the same dish every year. You can even call it "Tom's mashed potatoes" or "Lisa's pecan pie." We usually make a great pumpkin soup. My kids don't eat it, but they love being called into the kitchen to see Mom or Dad cry when we start cutting all those onions.

You can reach Katherine Snow Smith by e-mail at snowsmith@verizon.net or write Rookie Mom, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731.

[Last modified November 20, 2005, 00:54:20]