Thanksgiving

Some views of our table yesterday.

 A traditional Thanksgiving meal even if it was just for two of us this year. This is the first year that I've hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my own home. Usually, I would prepare it ahead of time and take it to Mom's house to finish cooking and put on her table. However, it is not the first year that this table has held the dinner on Thanksgiving Day. Originally, this table sat in my parents' kitchen at the old farmhouse. On a few holidays when there was just a small number of us, we would gather around this table to eat rather than in the more formal dining room.

Did I say originally? Not quite. Mom brought this table home after her father died. He had bought the table at an auction many years before and refinished it to put in their dining room. Their family had used it for many, many years. A number of holiday meals, including Thanksgiving were held around that table when it was part of the Wooster family. In fact, Mom had told me stories about some little children hiding under the tablecloths of this table and sitting on the legs that fan out from the middle. While sitting there, they could listen in secret to the adult conversations in the dining room. Who were these children? While there probably were multiple ones over the years, the ones that Mom talked about were one or more of her brothers and herself!

This table has been in our family for close to a hundred years at this point as it probably was sometime in the 1920s that Grandpa, Marion Wooster, bought the table at auction. However, it was used then, and we have no idea of how old it actually is or the history before it came to him. Probably a lot more holiday dinners, especially since, if I had the room, there are more leaves I could put in the table and expand it even more for a larger crowd to easily gather around it.