Thanksgiving At The Homestead; The Wynfield Creek Years

The biggest change in most people’s holiday traditions typically results from marriage. Two completely different, often conflicting, sets of traditions have to be consolidated, mashed-up and ironed out. This process is even more difficult if the parents of the person you are marrying are divorced, which means you essentially have to merge THREE different sets of traditions. For the first several years Janet and I were married, we lived in The Little House on the Highway, which was not quite half-way between my parents’ house in Port Clinton and hers in Ft. Wayne. The first year, Janet’s mother actually came and had Thanksgiving dinner with us at my parents’ house. Back then, I was working as manager of a retail store, and while I had Thanksgiving day off for the first time in years, I would be putting in 14 hour days the rest of the holiday weekend, so it was impractical for me to travel anywhere. Once I got out of retail and into a more sane holiday work schedule, we began alternating Thanksgivings, typically spending Thanksgiving day with one family and then the day after with the other. The Ft. Wayne festivities were generally held at Janet’s sister’s house and not at one of her parents’. Her sister’s house was larger and also had the advantage of not showing “favoritism” toward one parent or the other. Truth be told, I actually enjoyed the Ft. Wayne Thanksgivings more than the Port Clinton ones, which by this point, due to the size of the extended family and some “personalities and issues,” had become something of a theater of the absurd.

In 1995, Janet and I moved to Charlotte and settled into the Wynfield Creek Homestead. We hadn’t really given much thought to how this would effect the Thanksgiving tradition, and the first year, we decided to just keep on as we had, albeit with a much longer drive over the river and through the woods. The drive north wasn’t too bad. We left our house around 9:00 AM on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and arrived at my parents’ house around 8:00 that night. Thanksgiving day was perfectly ordinary. On Friday we drove to Ft. Wayne and had another Thanksgiving dinner with Janet’s sister and her family. Early Sunday morning, we left on the return trip and that’s when things turned ugly in the form of 500 miles of bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic. We pulled up to our driveway around midnight, turned to each other and said in unison, “okay, never doing that again.”

Consequently, the next year we went off in search of our own North Carolina Thanksgiving tradition. We couldn’t see the value in cooking a whole turkey for just the two of us, so I fell back on the “Thanksgiving dinner out” concept from my days at the CIC, with a touch of Manly Outdoor Activity for good measure. We spent the first part of that Thanksgiving hiking at Lake Norman State Park, then had dinner at Cracker Barrel. It was an okay arrangement, but not very Thanksgiving-y.

The next year, we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a colleague at the software company where I worked. With no other particularly good options, we accepted. I’d love to tell you more about that day, but honestly I don’t remember. My colleague was such a good host that my wine glass remained completely full for the whole day. I have no idea how much I actually drank, but I recall at one point wanting to stand up and realizing that I couldn’t.

In 1998, I took a job with another firm and was immediately introduced to a new Thanksgiving tradition, the Turkey Trot. I was told that everyone from the office ran in this annual event on Thanksgiving morning at the South Park Mall. I hadn’t run much since college, but certainly didn’t want to be the odd man out at my new firm, so I started training for what I initially thought was a 5K. About two weeks before the event, I learned that it was actually an 8K, which doesn’t sound like a huge difference; unless you are barely making it the 5K. For those who are metrically challenged, it’s the difference between 3 miles and 5 miles. Finally, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving I made the full 5 miles under 55 minutes (which I perceived to be a slow, but not embarrassing pace) for the first time. I was ready. Of course, on the actually day, everybody else from the office begged out of the race for one reason or another, leaving me to run all by myself.

I ran in the Turkey Trot for the next several years until my bad knees finally caught up with me. During those years, we alternated between cooking a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner at home, occasionally joined by Janet’s father, having Thanksgiving dinner at the very CIC-like North Harbor Club, or joining our friends, Steve and Fern Dallas, for their family dinner.

Sometime around 2005 or 2006, a local radio station offered free Charlotte Bobcats tickets for the night before Thanksgiving to anyone bringing a frozen turkey to their station to donate to a local homeless shelter. That sounded like a neat idea and a new tradition was born. For whatever reason, the Bobcats - now Hornets - tend to play a home game on the night before Turkey Day. I think they have done so 5 of the past 7 years, and when they do, Janet and I are at the game.