Thanksgiving at my Grandma Bell's house when I was a kid was a big thing. We had a lot of family and there was always tons of food.
There were too many of us to actually sit at the table, so some people would make a plate and go off into either the living room or the den to eat from tv trays or with plates in their laps. My grandma and aunts would be in the kitchen along with my older cousins making food....And then...
It was like clockwork every year, we'd realize we had "forgotten" something. Cue the older cousins who had drivers licenses volunteering to go to the store and they'd be gone forever.
I had no idea what my cousins were doing on those trips to the store. By the time I got old enough to be the one going to the store, our Thanksgiving celebrations had gotten smaller. But I could drive now!
So I found out mostly my cousins cut out to secretly smoke cigarettes and to buy more wine or beer for the aunts and uncles. I drove my little Cavalier and the cousins smoked and we bought Clare Du Bois Chardonnay and the ever elusive stick of butter or whipped cream that was "forgotten."
We'd get back and everyone would eat. We'd snooze all over the house. People would start leaving and my older cousins would disappear to go out with friends. Sometimes I'd be heading out to go be on the radio that night. Anyone who stayed at the house settled down to watch movies or whatever was on cable after the football game. We'd get up and eat more every so often. My Grandma would sit in her green recliner and drink coffee and have cigarettes. The cat would finally come out again.
After my Grandpa passed and my Grandma and Dad and I moved into a condo, largely we didn’t have big dinners with the cousins anymore. Everyone sort of stayed at their own homes for the holidays and when my Grandma passed my Dad and I started going out to dinner if we had Thanksgiving dinner at all, since we were both working most of the time. They were much quieter than the all day affair of the Thanksgivings on Panama Lane.