Thanksgiving Thoughts

Anna and Mo are safely home for Thanksgiving. My sister and her family had a safe trip to NYC which included trips to the Met, MOMA, Rockefeller Center and seeing the big balloons blown up on Wednesday evening and then flown on Thursday a.m.

Here at St Mark's Thanksgiving features worshipping with our sisters and brothers at Hope UCC and Gethsemane Lutheran. This year was our turn to host the service. Pastor Kendra Nolde of Gethsemane preached a fine sermon and she read an even more wonderful poem about giving thanks by Gerhard Frost. Steve had done spectacular dried flower arrangements. The offering was for Faith Beyond Walls/Interfaith Partnership's work in rehabbing apartments for people who are settling in St Louis having been flooded out of homes in Louisiana. (More about them below.) Sue from St Mark's made coffee and muffins for coffee hour but most people just dashed home to tend their turkeys or set their tables.

Then we had Thanksgiving dinner at St Mark's parish hall. I can't remember how long we've been doing this for. I refer to it as the "orphans' Thanksgiving dinner" -- it is really for people who don't have extended family to celebrate with or who, for some reason, aren't celebrating with them. This year we had several people from St John's church, including their rector Teresa. We also hosted Bishop Bullen and Fr. John from the Sudan and a gentle who said he'd heard about our dinner at the Friends meeting. There were about 36 of us, I think. At least we set the table for 32 and didn't have enough and had to set up another table. We had a maple glazed "olde New England" recipe from Epicurious.com with an herbed bread stuffing. I forgot to do the maple glazing, however. We also had the orange and basil turkey from Splendid Table. Once carved up they were pretty much indistinguishable. The Spellers also brought roasted brussels sprouts with red peppers, shallots and balsamic vinegar from the Dierberg's Everybody Cooks magazine and mashed potatoes. People brought wonderful and amazing things: mashed potatoes with noodle gravy, sweet potatoes baked with strudle topping, corn pudding, cauliflower cheese, an amazing array of pies, gingerbread and much, much more. Beverly made sure that we had creamed onions, a relish tray and whole berry cranberry sauce, all staples of my childhood Thanksgivings and (thousands of miles away) of hers. My image of Thanksgiving is of gathering as many people as you can around the table and just of eating. Once or twice as a kid, I took part in various Plymouth Thanksgiving costumed processions, back in the days before our eyes were open about the founding Thanksgiving myth. But mostly we just sat around all day and ate. And I realize that some of the people who were fixtures around my grandparents' table may themselves have been people with no extended family to party with: "Uncle John" who never married, varioud dutch uncles and aunts who didn't have children of their own or if they did never spent holidays with them.