Holidays, A Time for Thanks

written By Leigh Ripley

I’ve had three early summer babies, meaning I’ve cooked three Thanksgiving dinners with one hand. I honorably wore the martyr hat with a smile on my face and a baby on my hip. Honestly, it is amazing dinner made it to the table. In the bigger picture, our dinner table was forever increased by one which increased our gratitude enormously.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are my two favorite holidays. As a child growing up in New Jersey, family members from New Jersey and New York would congregate around my mother’s dinner table every year. I’ve never liked turkey, yet Thanksgiving is one of my favorites. If it wasn’t the entrée, then surely it was the company.

Christmas brought the usual suspects back and my anticipation for Santa was only outweighed by my euphoria over the return of ‘everybody.’

In the drifter years, when I first moved to Montana in 1996, my holidays consisted of other drifters; friends with no family here. I prepared the meals as my mother had done for so many years and made every attempt to make it feel like home. Though it never could quite perfectly mimic my mother’s table filled with my family, it was a new kind of family to be thankful for nonetheless.

Flash-forward to 2011, my mother-in-law lives in Bozeman and my parents are in the process of moving here. I have a husband, three kids and some of the same friends from back in the drifter days. Some years those friends join us around my table and to me, it finally feels like home. Over the years we have carved out our own traditions (like Jinga during appetizers) and I watch my own children bounce off the walls waiting for Aunt Joan and Uncle Dan (a.k.a. drifter-day friends) to arrive. To us, it is the best day of they year.

The holidays are here. Welcome the weeks ahead with patience, gratitude and giving. Take a good look at your many fortunes and find a way to share with those less fortunate. The options are as endless as our love… I know, I made you sing “Endless Love”.

Gobble gobble