
I’ve tried to think about what I wanted to write about Thanksgiving this year. But 2020 has been a year of absolute craziness. My year started off rough with some sickness that just led into the whole COVID pandemic. Our Thanksgiving this year is like a lot of everyone else’s, different. Some people’s Thanksgiving is different in a good way and for some, not so much.
This year is just different. Normally we go to Cumberland Falls to enjoy Thanksgiving there and walk down to the falls. Misty and the boys normally go down to a beach area and write the year in the sand while the boys squat behind it while Misty takes their picture. And of course, there was parade watching, football watching and all of us watching my brother take a picture of dad after dinner sleeping in his recliner.
Thanksgiving was just not complete until he got that picture. Which typically occurred about 5 minutes from coming home. 🙂
But not 2020. A good friend of mine lost his mom to COVID so his Thanksgiving is different. A former boss of mine passed away this year, so his family’s Thanksgiving will be different.
Scrolling through social media today and see how everyone is adjusting to Thanksgiving in 2020. I don’t know, but it feels like Thanksgiving is really the first big adjustment for everyone during the pandemic. Yeah, everyone has had to pivot in one way or another. Working from home. School from home. Shutdowns that impact everyone but for some reason to me, Thanksgiving is just so much more different.
2020 is just different.
It’s easy to think 2020 is just a horrible year that we all want to go away and I think that a lot. But I guess we all have something to be thankful for and I am trying to focus on that.
But it’s hard.
Thanksgiving growing up was always our family’s holiday.
Christmas was nice but growing up in a family that owned a couple of retail businesses, Christmas was always a busy time. So Christmas morning was a time to rest and relax from the shopping chaos. And there was always the day after Christmas which was also busy, so you only had the day to recover.
Easter was always meeting with my dad’s family at the local cafeteria and standing in line for an hour or so to get your food and eat.
But Thanksgiving was just ours.
Mom would cook a big dinner. We would open our house to family that didn’t have Thanksgiving. But it was still ours. It was the one meal of the year that we ate at the dining room table and not the kitchen table. It was a tight fit sometimes but it was fun.
I think the only time in I don’t know long other than this year that I didn’t have Thanksgiving with my parents was one of the years I was traveling with Women’s Basketball at EKU. We were playing in Georgia over the weekend and had to be on the road on Thanksgiving to be there on time. Thanksgiving dinner that year was the Thanksgiving buffet at a Shoneys.
So I am trying to focus on the fact that I still have my parents. Hopefully, this mess will go away and my family can get together for Thanksgiving next year at Cumberland Falls. Misty and boys can write 2021 in the sand. Misty and I can get our picture taken in front of the big tree in the lobby.
So be thankful for all you have this year and I’ll leave you with terrible tragedy at the Pinedale Shopping Mall in 1978.
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