The Most Important Holiday Ingredient: Tradition
(Posted November 27, 2024)
When I think back to Thanksgiving dinners from my youth, it’s an amalgamation of people, of tastes and especially, of smell. To me the odor of roasting turkey absolutely HAS to have an overlay of tobacco smoke, some from my father’s pipe packed with Revelation, and the rest from my Grandfather Jimmy’s cigars that Dad always called, “those awful ropes.”
We “womenfolk” were always in the kitchen, either rinsing off “the good china” and arranging the place settings, or sharing the task of ricing and mashing potatoes, or dressing up a plate of my Grandmother’s strange but always welcome tomato aspic. When all was ready, the biggest task was to pull the guys away from the television set to eat. We’d all bow our heads and give thanks, although sometimes I wondered if the gratitude was for the fact that the opposing team on the TV football field wasn’t doing as well as our team,
Thanksgiving Past and Present
Thanksgiving present is always a rerun in my mind of all the Thanksgivings past we were able to have with the family and friends who shared the most important holiday ingredient of all: Tradition. A day to be with people who loved us enough to share it with us. Time being what it is, none of those treasured faces are here anymore in touchable form. But they are definitely the participants, for all eternity in what is most important to us.
Where Holiness Resides on Thanksgiving
When theologists want to look for where the “holiness” is in Thanksgiving, they should check the spaces between people who, just for the day, make room for others with whom they might not agree, who make room for the silly antics of kids who are too loud for geriatric ears, who quietly make room for the hopeful faces of dogs under the table just waiting for something to drop. That’s where holiness abides – its other name is Love.
First Sunday of Advent: The Hanging of the Greens
Next Sunday we enter another realm where Tradition resides in our church: The Hanging of the Greens. This First Sunday of Advent, by tradition, is the Sunday of Hope. Certainly this year we need an extra large helping of Hope to carry us through a season where we need to lay aside our differences and invest our energy in seeing the coming of that tiny Baby who will show us the way to mutual respect. Please come and join us next Sunday as we decorate the tree.