Thanksgiving Day Bargains - Thanksgiving, Don't Fence Me Out

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and we all know what that means. We will get together with family members and eat way too much. If you are just a little nostalgic, and many baby boomers are, you will follow with tradition and try to make this year just like last year. I do not know what it is within us that keeps us trying to keep each and every holiday just like it was the year before. Oh! Maybe that is why we call it a tradition.

For the past thirty years my family has been meeting at my sisters' house and celebrating Thanksgiving. Growing up there were the five of us, a rather large family by modern standards. When we were young it was so much fun. All five of us would get together and stay at my sisters' house for Thanksgiving. She lives about a two hour drive from the rest of us, except for Charlie who has at least a three hour drive. My Mom has been divorced from my Dad for over 25 years so naturally she also has been a big part of the tradition at Thanksgiving.

I do not know about your family but mine is real close. The five of us were born between 1952 and 1957. If that seems a bit extreme, do not be quite so concerned because my Mom had twins in 1952. That makes me and my twin brother the oldest. My three sisters followed in three of the following four years.

You can imagine the excitement of getting together as a bunch of newly married brothers and sisters. Believe me when I tell you that the brother and sister -in laws fit in amazingly well. They are just like brothers and sisters to me. To add to our joy, and chaos, each of us were beginning to have our own families.

Well we could not wait for the Thanksgiving week-end. We generally arrived at Brendas' house as soon as hour work schedule would permit us. The men could not wait to show off their athletic ability. We played basketball, pitched horseshoes, tossed the football around, and usually had plenty of energy after dark to get into a great game that I call... brother-in-law poker.

Now the girls at these early marathon Thanksgivings usually had their hands full preparing the meals and catching up on all the latest gossip. Keep in mind that this is just my male version of what they did. In actuality I am probably not the most reliable person to evaluate their behavior. I do know that they never missed shopping on the busiest shopping day of the year on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Somehow or another it seemed like each year we would try to top the year before. That was not hard to do while we were all in our twenties and thirties. We continued every Thanksgiving to exhibit our prowess and competitive nature in any and all forms of competition. Even the women seemed to find sales and stores that kept them busy longer and longer each Thanksgiving.

The truth is though, we built a fence. We painted that fence each and every year with words like pride, selfishness, show off, vanity, and greed. We still visit each and every year at my sister Brendas' house. The fence, it is still there. We are so much more mature now than we use to be. Now we take time to visit with each other. We pray for each other and truly care for what the other person has to say. We would never think of tearing down that fence. We now paint our fence with love, patience, compassion, humbleness, light, and truth.

You guessed it... the baby boomers are all in our fifties now. Thanksgiving is just as important to us today as it ever was. We continue to love each other like we always have, we're just a little better at it now than we used to be.

You see fences are like everything else in life. They can be good or bad. They can keep you out or keep you in. Our fence is colored with a life time of tradition that we just call....Thanksgiving.