A Simple Celebration Of Thanks

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I'm actually pretty much of a holiday junkie. I love Christmas with its lights and music and hopeful proclamation of peace and good will; Halloween with its spooky ghosts and goblins; New Years and Mardi Gras with their great food and merriment; Easter and Labor Day and the Fourth of July, and well, all the smaller holidays that mark our days with bright red asterisks and make them special.

Oh, I know that every day we open our eyes and take in a breath is special. Twenty-four hours is twenty-four hours after all - a turkey picture on the calendar doesn't magically transform one particular day of the month into something extraordinary. Or does it? After all, isn't that what a holiday is about? Taking an ordinary day, marking it with some special remembrance or significance, so that all of us can in some way be the better for acknowledging it.

I think that's one of the reasons I like holidays so much. I feel like a better person for acknowledging and celebrating these special days. After all, holidays are a uniquely human creation - and I think their celebration not only helps put us in touch with our past, it helps bring down walls in the present and build bridges toward the future.

And of all our American holidays, Thanksgiving is particularly good for doing all of the above. For one thing, we can focus our attentions on just two things - family and food. We don't have to buy presents, hide eggs, sew costumes or decorate trees. We just have to open our cookbooks, put on our aprons and roll up our sleeves. Some of the recipes we prepare for this special meal are so tried-and-true, they practically make themselves. Perhaps in our family we're noted for a favorite dish and that's the one everyone will be waiting for when we arrive. Somehow camaraderie and good spirits run high all day long, from the first sighting of Snoopy in the Macy's Parade, through every touchdown right to the appearance of that magnificent golden brown turkey (or vegetarian specialty!) at the head of the table. This holiday just naturally lends itself to honoring traditions while bridging generational gaps.

And to me, that's one of the best things about Thanksgiving. While we honor what it represents, our nation's recognition of a need to give thanks for our bounty and good fortune, we are also able to add our own unique touches to the holiday - recipes that reflect the region where we live or the culture that shaped our particular family.

But however your family celebrates Thanksgiving, whether you prepare the entire feast or bring that special recipe everyone anticipates or you sit in front of the television set all day cheering your favorite football team, remember that when everyone is gathered around the table together, there is one more ingredient vital to the Thanksgiving menu. That ingredient is thanks.

Thanks for surviving another year together; thanks for the wonderful memories of those who have left us; thanks for the health we too often take for granted; thanks for the hope that feeds our spirits and keeps us trying; thanks for the chance to make things a little better for those less fortunate. And especially thanks for the love of the people with whom we are sharing this wonderful and very special day of Thanksgiving. May all of us have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving Day. And may all of us have Hope and Peace in the year ahead.

Some Dads Just Know About Halloween

My Dad always knew about Halloween. This is not a trait any kid should take for granted because many fathers don't understand Halloween at all. I know my brothers and I appreciated our Father's unique talents in this regard because right around the first of October we would automatically shift into our best behaviors so as not to interrupt the unearthly workings of our Father's imagination as he set about planning for the Great Night.

How does a Dad acquire this knowledge of demons, witches, ghosts and goblins? I'm convinced it's handed down from his own Father, a special inheritance resulting from years of carving intricate jack-o-lanterns, endless hours of thinking up costumes and countless miles traversed with trick-or-treating kids.

One of my earliest Halloween memories was being cradled in my Father's arms as he took my older brother and his friends trick-or-treating. I swear I can remember the scratchiness of his beard against my cheek and the smell of coffee on his breath as he laughed and admonished the boys not to run too far ahead. I must have been no more than four because once I got into kindergarten, I was allowed to wear a costume and walk holding onto my Father's hand.

As we got older, my Father's Halloween schemes got more elaborate, perhaps because he realized the number of Halloween's we'd be sharing together was dwindling. My father was a stuntman and screenwriter, and one year he "borrowed" the costume from the movie "Creature From The Black Lagoon." At our front door he planted a sign written in blood (okay, red paint) challenging the brave of heart to follow the path of glowing jack-o-lanterns around to the back of the house. All night long adventuresome kids pushed and shoved each other down the trail of eerily grinning faces until they reached our backyard gate. Usually at least one out of the crowd was courageous enough to open the screeching gate and cautiously step into the yard. Sitting in our den behind partially opened blinds, my Father (dressed as The Creature) would blink the desk lamp on and off so that our visitors could catch a scary glimpse of him. Sometimes that was enough to send kids flying in all directions, but for those brave enough to creep forward, The Creature, who had now stepped onto the porch with a huge bowl of candy, were rewarded for their courage.

Then there was the Halloween I came home from school to find our front yard transformed into a cemetery complete with headstones, ghosts floating in the tree branches and a "dead man" hanging from a rope. I'm not sure what my Mother thought of all these antics but she was always a good sport, sending us off with a good hot meal in our tummies and lots of homemade oatmeal cookies awaiting our return.

My brothers also inherited my Dad's Halloween gene, especially my brother Leo who makes his house and yard so scary, I think I'd have nightmares sleeping in his house at night.  I'm more of the fun, kid-cute and friendly Halloween type of celebrant.  From decorations to parties with apple bobbing, games and, of course, trick-or-treating, Halloween was always a special night when my girls were little.  The ghosts and goblins around our house were more fun than really scary.

Now we have a new generation initiated into the spooky fun of Halloween and I am eagerly looking forward to strolling down the street tonight with three of my eight (yes, eight!) grandchildren. Whether dressed as witches or ninjas, sharks or cartoon characters, kids and grown-ups alike will be having a spooky good time.  Ah, isn't life grand?

Tonight, when all the festivities are over, I may just take another late night stroll, this time with my own cup of coffee in hand, to share some silent memories with my Dad. You see, the man who always loved this day, left this earthly realm on Halloween. Always one for a dramatic entrance, Dad knew how to make a dramatic exit as well. See you out there, Papo.

Women of Two Centuries

My brothers and I called our father's mother, Grandma Mac. Her real name was Grace Dixon McMahon. Born in August 1879 in San Francisco, CA, she was the daughter of Fremont Dixon of Pennsylvania and Maria de Leon of Mexico. Not much is known about her early life, but after she married my Grandfather Edwin, they settled in Sonora, CA and by 1900, at the age of 21, she already had borne the first two of her eleven children.

Two thousand miles away, around the time that Grace was six, my other Grandmother, Mary Alice, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Beauregard Cornelius Heidt and Mary Helen McInnes. She married my Grandfather James Avery Finger in 1912 at the age of 26 and bore him three children, two sons and a daughter, my mother.

These two women had more than just thousands of miles separating them. In many ways, they couldn't have been more different. My California Grandmother was born into a state still wild by Eastern standards and still reverberating from the shock waves of the Gold Rush. Indeed, her husband's father had come to California in 1858 in hopes of finding gold and was captured by Indians and held captive for two years. My South Carolina Grandmother, on the other hand, grew up in what was considered a genteel society, could trace her roots to at least as far back as the Revolutionary War, married a doctor and had a nanny to help raise her three children.

What these two women did have in common though were lives devoted to god, family, responsibility and community. Grace was Catholic and rearing her children in her faith was of supreme importance to her. Mary Alice was Episcopalian and church attendance every Sunday was a ritual that was never missed. These two women also believed in personal responsibility. Each of my father's siblings had responsibilites in that busy household and from their youngest years learned how to look after and take care of each other. In my mother's family, one learned early to accept responsiblity for one's actions for, as my Grandmother often told my mother, "If you make your bed hard, you will have to lie in it." There was no accepting of excuses in either of those lady's families; each family member had to pull his or her own weight. These were good lessons to be learned on both sides of a continent that would soon be caught in the quagmire of a Great Depression.

As their children grew, these women also devoted much of their time to their communities. During the Depression, Grandmother Mary Alice sometimes accompanied my Grandfather on his housecalls in the poorer neighborhoods and willingly accepted jars of preserves, chickens, whatever the people could afford as payment. Grandma Mac made a point of visiting the sick and needy throughout the Sonora area.

These strong moral women bridged the gap of two centuries, combining the best qualities of their 19th. Century beginnings with those of the new. I hope I have inherited at least part of what was strong and good about them to take with me into the 21st. Century.

(In the above photo, at their one and only meeting about 1955, Mary Alice Finger and Grace McMahon, shared some moments and experiences over coffee.)

I have to smile when I see this photo of me with my parents and older brother Leo. After all, I know what a good sport my Mom was being. You see, my Dad, a stuntman for the movies, would often be away on location. And when I decided to arrive a week early, he was off filming a movie about the Civil War. (It was not his first Civil War movie; he had done stunt work for Clark Gable in the 1939 epic, "Gone With The Wind" - or so our family lore goes.) When the studio found out that my Mom was a Southerner from Charleston, South Carolina, they decided it would be great press for the movie if they showed my Dad rushing home to see his newborn daughter, Alicia Grace, still wearing his Union Army uniform. I don't think it actually helped the movie any, but it did get us in the paper and for years provided me with something to brag about at school.

I don't remember much of the years when my Dad did stunts for the movies because in 1955 (I was only 5 then) he was badly injured in a stagecoach stunt and he never did stunt work again. Having to provide for his family in some way, he turned to what he knew best - Western movies - and began writing screenplays. And so most of the memories I have of my Dad are not of watching him tumble off horses but rather watching his hand fly across pages and pages of yellow legal pads, his finger gripping those #2 pencils so tightly that even when he was 82 and I held his hand in the hospital for the last time, I could still feel the indentation left behind by all those years of pencils.

My Dad was a terrific storyteller but not much of a businessman. Yet I never had the sense that he wasn't doing anything less than the most important work - even if he wasn't grabbing a briefcase and heading off to an office every day like the Dads of most of my friends. My Dad was a writer and to me that was akin to being some kind of god, a creator of words and sentences and stories - a creator of lives. And sometimes those lives were every bit as real to me as my own.

It is no surprise then, at least not to me, that from the first moment that I can remember holding a #2 pencil in my own hand, I wanted to be a writer. But what does surprise me sometimes is how long it took for all those words that I had written over the years to finally weave themselves into a story. What happened in between all those words, I guess, has been my life.

Funny, how time (or the perception of it) changes when you have children. And suddenly your priorities change as well and you're caught up in a whirlwind of all things baby and then toddler and then little girl, and before you know it, you're fundraising chair for the Cedargrove PTA, and your writing, what there is of it, is measured, not in chapters and endings and new chapters, but in stolen sentences between carpools and piano lessons and tennis matches. And the thing of it is, you wouldn't change it for anything and part of you feels guilty for not being the writer you think you should be - and part of you feels guilty for even thinking you should be anything but the mother to those wonderful beautiful children.

But if you're lucky and the gods are smiling (or looking the other way), those children do grow up, and as heart wrenching as it may seem - and believe me, it seems that way - if you've done the job you were supposed to do, they actually become independent. And then your PTA days and carpool days are relegated to the crinkled pages of memory albums - and those stolen sentences of yours can actually become paragraphs and chapters and endings. And hopefully even new beginnings.

Well, at least until those wonderful grandchildren come over.