My Favorite Holiday

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.


Christmas is too expensive.


I haven't always had a date for Valentine's Day.


I hate holidays that are only excuses for drinking like St. Patrick's Day.

Memorial Day....Fourth of July....Veteran's Day.....Do we really need three patriotic holidays within a span of six months? Pick two or spread them out.

Even though I am retired I can't get over the fact that I still associate Labor Day with being back in school.


But the reason Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday has to do with homesickness. It was 1976, I had graduated from college that spring and Judy and I moved to the south suburbs of Chicago to start teaching. We had both grown up in Southern Illinois and I don't believe either of us were prepared for the culture shock of living in the suburbs or the disdain with which people in the suburbs of Chicago held for Southern Illinois.

We were six hours away from both of our parents, still driving an American Motors Hornet that had a tick in the engine. The car dealer that sold it to us was friend of the family. He gave us a very good deal on the car since none of his mechanics could determine the cause of the noise. He warned us that because of the undetermined cause of the noise the car could stop running at any minute.

I never trusted the thing even though it turned out to be a "basically good car" as Judy's father always referred to it. The entire time we were married Judy and I never owned a car no matter how suspect that he didn't refer to as a "basically good car."

The idea of being a six hours away from our families seemed like an eternity when you had to get there in a car that seemed to be no more than a ticking time bomb.

It was the first time in my adult life that I recognized how blessed I was to have the family I had and to have married into a family that I regarded as highly as Judy's. We were never so happy to be anywhere that Thanksgiving as Southern Illinois. I remember being severely depressed  when I saw snowflakes outside my suburban Chicago bedroom window in the middle of October!

One of my favorite photos (and one of the few) of my father and I was taken that weekend. We were sitting on the seat of a Model A truck he had just finished restoring.

My dad was always restoring an old car. Most of the old cars he renovated were never completed to the point where he got them running because someone would see him working on them and buy them from him before he finished. But this one had just been completed while we had been up north those few months. He took great delight driving us around the neighborhood that weekend.

The rest of the weekend was filled with the usual Thanksgiving fare cooked up by all the women of both families working together in kitchens to serve up the traditional holiday favorites. We were at a time in our lives when we got to make the rounds not just to our parents' homes but to our grandparents' homes as well

I can't think of that Thanksgiving without thinking of my Dad and his model A truck. I didn't realize how self-sacrificing he had been all his life until the last year or so he was with us. (Dad died in 1992 at the age of 67.....young by today's standards....Joan Rivers had only had six face lifts by that age.)

He was always the last in the family to have his needs met. I wonder how many of those unfinished antique cars were sold to  provide me or one of my brothers with something unimportant that seemed absolutely necessary to us at the time.

I love you, Dad. Thanks for making that Thanksgiving so memorable.