Thanksgiving Day

Ah, the weather is cool! Finally! Yesterday was a very warm 78. Today, however, is cool and makes me think of Thanksgiving Days when I was a child on the East Coast.
My Thanksgiving Days at home were filled with the City's Christmas Parade, grandparents, elderly great aunts and an uncle coming to our home for a turkey dinner. My mother began very early in the morning cooking the turkey and other dishes. I remember one year seeing her taking the turkey in it's big roaster pan outside and placing the pan on the hood of her car. I don't know why this memory sticks with me. Maybe because she needed help with the back door or because it seemed so odd to me to see her carry food outside and place it on her car. I suppose the turkey was too hot to serve. I have no clue. Children see, remember and then cannot figure out the reasons for parental behavior years later.
My father would pass around sherry to the old people seated in our living room. I would be dressed in Church clothes and have to sit with them. After the usual conversations, I would go into the kitchen to get in the way of my mother who would be doing forty things at once. My father would take over the stove to roast pecans in butter and salt. I miss him! He would burn the pecans every year.
Around the table we would gather. My glum older sister, the grandparents, old aunts and uncle amd my cute little sister. A dog under the table or banished outside. My mother served stewed oysters, cornbread dressing, biscuits, cranberry sauce, burn pecans, celery and olives in a cut glass dish, and gee! I can't remember any of the green vegtables! For dessert she would make wine jelly with wine flavored whipped cream. Pecan pie, too.
I inherited the uncomfortable dining room table which had legs that I bumped into with my chair and knees my entire childhood. I have the table now in our home. I've folded the table leaves and use the table to hold photographs. I wish I had a picture of us all around that table. I'm sure one exists, I just don't know where.
The City Christmas parade came in the afternoon while the old people snoozed. My father would take us to stand on the parade route to watch the floats. Loud marching bands from the high schools and colleges blew by us. Santa Claus ended the parade sitting high up on a sleigh float.
Just for now, I'd like to go back to that parade with my father and hold his hand in the cold as I did years ago.