As a child in New York, Thanksgiving was a cozy holiday with lots of warm memories. How my parents managed to produce a full blown feast from that tiny kitchen on Long Island is a miracle, and where we all sat is lost to memory. The Cape Cod my father built in the 1950s was a small house. There wasn’t a single room in it that could accommodate us all.

My mother’s sister was married to my father’s brother, and on Thanksgiving my aunt, uncle, and my double cousins often came for dinner from New Jersey. My Italian grandmother’s birthday was in late November, and we celebrated it the day after Thanksgiving.

Mom typically made the pies the day before, her apple pies oversized with big bumpy crusts. She made the crusts with margarine, flour, and ice water, rolling them out on the kitchen table with a long wooden pin that her own mother had used. The apples were bought by the bushel from local farmers, peeled and cut into big chunks, not thin slivers. Seasoned with a sprinkle of cinnamon and sweetened with only a handful of raisins, my mother’s pies were tart and natural. I miss my mother's apple pies desperately.

The plain pumpkin pies of my early childhood later morphed into pies with added coconut or pumpkin-apple pies. Sometimes my mom cooked and sieved fresh pumpkin, but more often she used canned. We had mincemeat pies when I was small which evolved into mincemeat-apple combos and then disappeared altogether as I got older, I think because mincemeat had fewer and fewer fans around the table, and my mom always complained it was expensive.

Our turkeys were enormous and stuffed with browned sausage bits, celery, onion, raisins, apple, and white bread, which my parents toasted before tearing it apart. The sweet potatoes were simply baked on the racks around the turkey. We normally had broccoli and cauliflower with cheese sauce, mashed potatoes, and canned jellied cranberry sauce. My father normally made the giblet gravy, and we had cider to drink. My mother had decorative stainless steel serving bowls that she used at the holidays, including a special dish and serving utensil for the slices of canned cranberry sauce. You never see those dishes anymore, but for years my mom always gave them as a wedding shower gift. I have all these dishes of my mom's and use them on the holidays.

After dinner, I remember there being bodies sprawled on every upholstered surface in the house as people napped off their turkey hangovers. My dad and uncle would sit at the table for hours, often engaging in depressing conversations over glasses of whiskey. They seemed to have a propensity for gloomy discussions on Communism or the Second Coming or the next Great Depression. They scared me to death. It was no fun hanging out with the grown ups in the dining room!

Thanksgiving in Virginia was different. The houses we lived in had room for people to spread out. Thanksgiving afforded me a chance to see my grown sisters and their families, which added a whole new level of excitement. It was fun to see the Northern and Southern nieces and nephews get together and have a complete sense of family again. We often went walking through the country side after dinner, a new tradition that I loved.

After I went away to college, Thanksgiving was never the same. When E and I were first married and living in Oklahoma, we had many variations of lackluster Thanksgivings. The first Thanksgiving was fun because it was novel to just be with each other and cook the whole feast ourselves. Then it got old—fast. Everyone we knew spent Thanksgiving with their families and we were never invited to join and didn’t have anyone to invite.

One year I invited an Army lieutenant who critiqued every aspect of my cooking. Another year we attended a church potluck dinner on Thanksgiving and rattled around in a mostly empty parish hall and went home without leftovers. But maybe the worst year was when we joined a friend and his new girlfriend at the Holiday Inn for Thanksgiving. What was worse—eating Thanksgiving at a hotel restaurant or having to listen to his loud insipid girlfriend and her over-the-top social climbing friends?

Then there was the Thanksgiving I spent all alone because E had already moved back to Virginia and I was finishing up my last semester of university in Oklahoma. No dinner invitations came my way. Everyone had plans. I went to a community Thanksgiving dinner at a church that year too and by 1 p.m. my dinner was over and the whole empty weekend stretched before me with only my two dogs for company.

Once we moved back to Virginia, Thanksgiving was bittersweet. I had longed to live in Virginia for years but shortly after I moved back, my parents' health failed. I remember their last Thanksgiving, with my sister visiting and cooking a vegetarian feast next to Mom’s traditional one in the kitchen.

Some people feel all their losses at Christmas, I always feel mine at Thanksgiving. It is by far the toughest holiday for me to get through. We had some happy times with my brothers family after my parents died but mostly we were alone. In 2001, an attempt to spend Thanksgiving in Florida with E’s family dissolved into a really ugly family quarrel among some family members that left everyone upset and several people in tears. After that debacle, my girlfriend Lynn declared that I had had way too many horrible Thanksgivings, and she invited us to join her extended family in South Carolina for Thanksgiving weekend, something we really enjoyed.

In 2004, E’s sister, her husband, four boys, and E’s mom joined us for Thanksgiving weekend. We were packed in tight but had a good time—until my son A ate sour candy at a movie theater Thanksgiving night, washed it down with soda, and later threw up his entire dinner all over the bedroom he was sharing with his four cousins. Now THAT was memorable, especially since the other boys SLEPT through the whole incident while E and I took turns with the nasty cleanup, holding flashlights, trying not to wake anyone up.

Is it any surprise I haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving since then? Here in Belgium, each year we plan a trip that covers all of Thanksgiving week, and we explore a new city and pretend the holiday doesn’t exist (which is easy to do in Europe because Thanksgiving doesn’t exist here). But this year, money is tight, the exchange rate is horrible, and E has done so much business traveling this fall that he’s not eager to leave home. So here we are. Tomorrow while the rest of Belgium goes to work and school, I’ll make a Thanksgiving dinner, working with the ingredients I can get here, and I’ll try to create some good Thanksgiving memories for my kids.

Tell me about your Thanksgiving memories. The best, worst, or a favorite food or activity.

November 21, 2007