Sometimes, a family’s Thanksgiving memories are as much about the food on the table as they are about the people around it. While the staples of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner are pretty standard, each family prepares the meal in a slightly different way. Also, every person at the table has a favorite item or two. It is no secret that I love food. I also love Thanksgiving because of the meaning of the holiday, the focus on family, and, yes, the food. This year, Thanksgiving is at our house for the first time since our son was born. As I spend the next couple of days cleaning, cooking, and getting ready for the festivities I will be thinking about the items that will be on the table at our house and the reasons why they will be there.
In my opinion, a family’s Thanksgiving table is a little like a family photograph. Every dish, like every family member has a story. Like many families, we will have a turkey on our table. Some years we have locally raised free range turkey and other years we have a commercial turkey from the grocery store. A local bird was both hard to find and out of our price range this year. Our grocery store turkey has a story behind it that my family and I will always remember.
A local grocery store was offering a free frozen turkey up to twenty pounds if you used their store discount card, brought in a coupon from their store flyer, and spent a hundred dollars on groceries at the time that you got the turkey. My son and I went to the store today to get the turkey and the other groceries. When we arrived, I started getting some of the things on my list and realized that I should probably check on the turkey to make sure that there were still some turkeys in the store. It is a good thing that I checked because all of the frozen turkeys that were part of the promotion were gone.
The man behind the meat counter told me that there would be more frozen turkeys arriving late tonight or early tomorrow morning. I mentioned that I lived about an hour away from the store and that we would not be able to return to the store to get a turkey before Thanksgiving – wasn’t there something that he could do? I am not sure whether it was my convincing plea, my adorable two year old son sitting in the race car grocery cart, or my pregnant belly that did the trick – perhaps it was all three? He asked me to wait where I was and returned a few minutes later with a fresh turkey that was just about twenty pounds. Even though those turkeys were not part of the promotion, he was willing to give us one to use with the promotion in order to, as he put it, “make things right”. Even in a world where stores are busy, lines are long, and things are crazy this holiday season there are good people out there who work hard to make sure that their customers get what they need and walk away feeling cared for. This turkey story is just one of many things that I have to be thankful for this year.