Traditions Thanksgiving

I write this as I am sitting in an airport, awaiting a flight to Amsterdam. I’m off to Amsterdam to celebrate Thanksgiving. You might ask why I would celebrate an American holiday in a foreign country. Well, I have grown up knowing Thanksgiving as a holiday when families gather around the table to share a wonderful meal and to give thanks to God for the many blessings in their lives.

For me to share this meal with family, I need to travel to The Netherlands. My daughter and her husband live just outside of Amsterdam and this year, my son is at sea with the Coast Guard. So with suitcases full, my husband and I are carrying our traditions to another part of the world.

The suitcases are filled with canned pumpkin and stuffing; items my daughter was unable to find at her local supermarket. We’re carrying decorations for the Thanksgiving Day table, and I’m hoping my daughter has figured out all of the conversions from degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius. I’m also hopeful that the recipe my son-in-law found for turkey will allow him to create a familiar taste at that special meal.

Holidays have always been family time for us, so my son’s absence will be blatantly obvious. Knowing this, my daughter and I have planned a very non-traditional trip this Thanksgiving. We will be attending a German Christmas market in Dusseldorf. We came up with this idea because my fear was that our trying to recreate prior Thanksgivings might make his absence even more noticeable.

Some things we’re doing differently, but we are hanging on to others. When my children were in elementary school, we began the Thanksgiving tradition of the Jarman Thank You Jar. We took an old coffee can and decorated it. I cut a slot through the plastic lid, just large enough to slide slips of paper through. During the year, we would all take slips of paper from the pile next to the coffee can and write down events or things that we were particularly thankful for. Thanksgiving morning after we had finished eating breakfast, we would pass the Thank You Jar around and read out one by one all of the things we had been thankful for that particular year.

Sometimes the slips said “thankful I passed my Math test.” And other times they read “thankful Pop-Pop’s surgery went well.” We were thankful for big things and little things. Those precious slips just helped us to recall them. Sometimes particularly meaningful slips would end up in a book or in the Bible. This year, the Thank Yous are tucked in a ziplock bag in my carry on tote. Some traditions are just too hard to change. We’ll save the really good ones to share with my son on Christmas morning. And perhaps I’ll even add a thank you for his safe return home.

Flexible. I keep telling myself to be flexible. Those little children who used to sit on the sofa in the family room watching the Macy’s parade won’t be there this year. But I am sure that when there are new little ones sitting there intently watching the parade, there will be a Thank You in the jar for that!