This Was Us – at Thanksgiving

Until somewhere in the late 1980s, my Thanksgiving rituals had been as steadfast as anything in this life can be. I don’t exactly know when my mother decided our family would host the extended family celebration. But one of my earliest memories is of hiding under the kitchen table from the hordes of kinfolk gathering in the dining room for Thanksgiving. Maybe I was 3, and it was 1957. Is that when the tradition began? My older sisters probably can tell me.

All I can remember is that my mother, Goldie Mooney, told me that she wanted to have the whole family for the holiday in her new house – the sprawling ranch where I grew up was built in 1952 – and made sure the large dining room and the stretched living room would accommodate everyone. By the time I was old enough to remember, the event seemed to be well-established.

When it came to preparations for the massive midday feast for 30 to 50 people, everything started around Labor Day, maybe earlier. My mother would begin baking cake layers, wrapping them in multiple layers of aluminum foil and then pasting on a piece of masking tape with a description in her neat handwriting. What did she bake? I have a copy of a note she wrote – it’s on a sheet from a notepad with the name of some building supply business in Savannah. I’m guessing it was from the 1960s.

Under the “need to bake” category, she wrote in cursive with big loops:

Spice Cake

Chocolate

Bourbon Nut

German Chocolate

New Pound Cake (not sure what that was; her old pound cake was fabulous enough.)

Coconut

Cheeesecake

 

And under the already baked category, she had:

Praline,

Honey, Nut, and what looks like Orange Rum.

 

Finally, there is the "Want to Bake" category: The first word is hard to read but looks like lekach, the Yiddish word for honey cake -- maybe a different one than she already baked?

Also, new rum cake, something pumpkin, and mince meat.

It surely wasn't a mincemeat pie, however, because my mother absolutely couldn't fathom the concept of pies. "Why put in all that effort for something that would feed 8 or 12, if you were lucky,” she would declare whenever the topic of pies came up.

Her cakes, covered in sea foam icing, were always made 1.5 times the recipe with Swans Down cake flour, so that, when they were all on display on the buffet, it looked like a skyline of fluffy towers in pastel pinks, yellows, mint greens, and the white coconut for contrast. Sitting below them were the so-called “naked” cakes without icing – the melt-in-your-mouth pound cakes, nut cakes, honey cakes, and the like. The centerpieces always were her legendary cheesecakes dripping with blueberry or strawberry toppings. (She usually made a plain one – my favorite – just for me, and I often would have a slice for supper that night.) In the last years, she made Thanksgiving, the cheesecakes became more exotic; one favorite was her baklava cheesecake.

With all those cakes, Mama probably could have served dessert to a small battalion. Yet, by the Monday after Thanksgiving, there was rarely a crumb of cake left, unless she made a fruitcake. Why did she make fruitcake, which nobody really likes that much? Probably because she was born in Claxton, GA, the home of Claxton Fruitcake, which is touted as “the world's most famous old-fashioned holiday fruitcake.” That’s where my immigrant grandparents lived for a while before settling in Vidalia, and I think fruitcake was in Mama’s blood, so she usually made one. Hers was better than most, but still had weird neon-colored fruit in it. After enough protests, she made bourbon nut cake instead, with emphasis on the bourbon, which was preferred. (I once had the horrifying experience of a friend's dog getting a bit drunk from eating that cake, which I had brought as a house gift. More on that story in another entry.)

It might be hard to imagine, but baking the cake layers and putting them in the freezer was just the first step. By mid-November, it was time to make the multiple gallons of Scramble. That was a Chex-mix-like snack made from several types of cereal, pretzels, and roasted nuts. The seasonings vary in recipes, but something about Mama’s generous combination of Lawry’s seasoned salt, Worcester sauce, garlic salt, and sometimes hot sauce created snack food magic. She would fill up several giant Tupperware-like containers with tightly sealed lids, and the Scramble would stay crispy until the big day. It was the same story: Usually, there were only a few sad-looking spiced Cheerios left in the bottom of the container by the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Next, our beloved housekeeper Earlene would start making the casseroles. Earlene was an amazing cook and the best multitasker I ever met. When I was a young adult, home to help with Thanksgiving in the 1980s, she already had a lot on her plate. By the early 1990s, she would become the first Black woman in Georgia to chair a county school board and later would play a pivotal role in bringing a vocational-technical school to the county. I would watch in amazement how she could chop onions or grind chicken livers while carrying on a coherent phone conversation about funding for a new middle school program. And this is when you had to stretch the telephone cord to keep talking!

(An aside: In another time and place, she wouldn’t have had to work as a cook or housekeeper. I wish she could have reached her full potential, and I know my parents felt the same way.  But I  also am so grateful to have her as such a major influence in my life and the lives of our family members.)

My mother, who owned a clothing store with my father, Morton Mooney, was also very active in the community and had a very full dance card. Much of her work for Thanksgiving was done on Sundays or late on weeknights. The only way she could make it all come together was by preparing a lot of items ahead of time.

According to a list I found in a homemade cookbook Mama gave me, the make-aheads in 1966 were squash casserole, asparagus casserole, and sweet-and-sour meatballs, as one of the appetizers. Some years there also was some type of beef cocktail franks with pineapple,  Those dishes stacked neatly in the freezer in tinted Corning Ware were in addition to the sides that were made later -- the two types of dressing, the roast potatoes, the string beans, the candied sweet potatoes, peas and mushrooms, my mother’s famous tossed salad with lemon dressing, the pickled peaches, the apple rings. And let us not forget the Jello molds -- Della Robia, grape, apple, and, the only one I would eat, cranberry with celery.  

Obviously,  some people might see this, to use the Yiddish word, as a potchke. But, while there was a lot of work involved, it was the centerpiece of my mother’s year. She loved everything about it – the planning, the shopping, the cooking, and, especially, having the extended family together and everyone enjoying themselves. And she was very, very good at it.

I was a witness to all this as a child and was always home for Thanksgiving week when I was in college and in graduate school. But I so enjoyed the Thanksgiving preparations and celebration that I continued to take vacations from work for that week well into my 30s, as long as my mother was preparing at the house in Jesup. It was a lot to put together Thanksgiving every year for 30-50 people, especially at the level Mama set for herself, and I was glad to help. Some of those years, one of my sisters was living in town, which made it that much more special, but in others, it was just the three of us as Thanksgiving week began. Honestly, just spending hours a day with Mama and Earlene was reward enough for me. The bonus was that, not only did I get to enjoy the delicious cooking smells and taste everything, but I also learned to cook from two master chefs.

At any age, I was usually already there on the Sunday of Thanksgiving week. That was when my mother’s first cousin, Sylvia, traditionally came over to polish the silver. Mama had an ornate set with place settings for 16 or more – including every specialty utensil imaginable, -- and it was an all-day job. As I child, that usually meant I got an entire day to play with my cousin Holly, Sylvia's daughter. When I got older, I often was in the kitchen, where Sylvia had all the silver spread out on the table, and I got to listen to the conversation. The two of them, my mother and her cousin, still giggled like schoolgirls and, several times during the day, Sylvia, who could be as funny as any stand-up comedian, would talk about how, the next year, she was going to make a sugared fruit decoration for the table. I don’t recall if it ever happened, but it was one of those predictable conversations I so appreciated then.

(An aside: Among the many pieces to each place setting of the baroque set are the petite oyster forks, even though Mama never served oysters. When my mother gave me her silver in the early 1990s, my rabbi helped me kasher it (make it kosher), and I began to use the oyster forks for gefilte fish. As my parents used to say, “You make do.”)

The first task after breakfast on Monday of Thanksgiving Week was going to the grocery store with my mother. I was well-practiced, having done it many, many times before, but the outing required at least two shopping carts and my relative youth to lift the two gigantic turkeys my mother had ordered for our Thanksgiving -- and the slightly smaller one for Earlene’s family event Thanksgiving night -- into one of the carts. By the time we were done and in the checkout line, the carts were overflowing.

 It wasn’t too bad when we had taken my father’s van to the shop; the back of the vehicle might have been completely full of paper sacks of groceries, but at least they fit. The bigger challenge was getting everything into a sedan. By the time all the food was loaded into the trunk and backseat, I was pouring sweat in the typically warm November day in southeast Georgia. Yet, I still would have to hold six cartons of eggs and several other breakables on my lap as my mother drove home carefully, fearful that any sudden move would precipitate a disaster and the need for another grocery store run.

Then, we would get down to the real work – making my mother’s signature white bread dressing in addition to the popular cornbread version. That, plus preparing the fresh sides and thawing the frozen ones, took all day and then some. (For food safety reasons, we usually added the eggs right before we baked everything on Thanksgiving Day.) One of my most vivid memories is watching Earlene boil the turkey necks and the giblets to make the stuffing. That delectable yet gamey fragrance always officially announced the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday to me.

We also had to wait until closer to the big day to cook and grind the chicken livers for chopped liver, prep the mammoth turkeys as well as the beef roast we always had for relatives who didn’t eat poultry, and put together some of the other dishes that didn’t keep well.

Later, those evenings, when we wouldn’t be in Earlene’s way, Mama and I would spread the cake layers out on the Formica countertop of the island that separated the kitchen from the breakfast room. She would make her famous sea foam frosting, a type of 7-minute cooked icing. Even as an adult, I delighted in choosing the colors for each cake; my favorites were pink and mint green, being a child of the midcentury.

With great precision, my mother would spread frosting between the layers with her venerable giant rubber spatula and stack them with the focus of a brick mason. Next, she would frost the outside. I don’t know how she did it, but no crumbs dared to embed themselves in her icing. Usually, there was coconut cake, and I would throw the flakes onto the sides until enough was sticking, while she began to place each cake in its own covered cakesaver. My favorite was the one with the wooden acorn on top.

(Another aside, it was quite difficult to find containers tall enough for her three-layer cakes with icing. I’m guessing she had to buy the ones made for wedding cakes. However she got them, they looked amazingly impressive displayed in the dining room. The smaller containers were reserved for the pound cakes and the like.)

Once the cakes were assembled, Mama turned to creating her signature Jello molds. For some people, I might as well have said we served dinosaur eggs. But, in the 1940s and 50s, when my mother started cooking, shimmering gelatin with fruit was the centerpiece of a festive meal, according to all the women’s magazines. Frankly, I was glad to see the demise of the trend, having an aversion to jiggly foods, but I also admit I don’t understand the attraction. Then, again, I didn’t live through the Great Depression or the food rationing in World War II, and probably couldn’t fathom the joy of serving dishes full of sugar and exotic fruit.

For us, the biggest challenge wasn’t getting the ingredients but finding fruit to fit in the indentations in my mother’s copper Della Robia mold. Starting as a small child, I got to eat the rejects, so I can tell you there was a lot of trial and error. I can’t remember all of the fruit that went into it, although I have a recollection that pineapple rings, canned pear halves, and cherries were among them. Making sure everything fit in its proper spot but not so tightly that it wouldn’t unmold was like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. The toughest, by far, was getting a banana with just the right curve to slip into its indentation.  After all that, it was always a pain to get it out of the mold intact, even though Mama had carefully greased the pan with Wesson oil. (Okay. I admit it. There was nothing artisanal about Jellow molds.)

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was so busy, I can’t really remember what happened. I know one or both of my sisters often were there, which helped all the preparations go faster. Sometimes, if we were really behind, Earlene would bring a friend or relative to help her, cleaning up while she cooked. Somehow, despite the chaos, it all got done every year.

When we awoke Thanksgiving morning to a full house of family and the aroma of turkey in the oven, there was much more work to do, including prepping the last-minute sides and salads. (I could make my mother’s signature iceberg lettuce salad in my sleep, from rubbing the mammoth wooden bowl, which I now have, with garlic to slicing the tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumbers just the way my mother liked it. The lemon juice I squeezed always found every spot where I had nicked my fingers in the prepping process.)

My sister Susan, who often would have arrived with her family late the night before, having left Spartanburg when her store closed, had an artistic flair and would be put to work decorating everything from the appetizer table to the chopped liver. It was amazing how festive she could make food with a couple of slivers of peppers and some tomato chunks. Give her a bunch of parsley, and the sky was the limit.

The middle sister, Linda, was usually in charge of setting the table, a mammoth task that took the organizational ability of an industrial engineer. Starting in the dining room, we had the formal wooden table and chairs with the Wedgewood china and the freshly-polished sterling silver flatware. By the time you got to the foot of the table, more than halfway into the living room, it sometimes was everyday melamine dishes with unmatched flatware on a rickety card table with the chairs we borrowed from the fire department. I don’t think anyone ever noticed once the food was on the table.

With whatever boyfriend or friend I had brought – or my very entertaining first husband Lloyd – I often was relegated to the far end of the table to make certain all the guests felt welcomed by the host family, even if they were sitting so distant from the head of the table. Much fun was had by all in our version of Siberia.

The tables and chairs were their own special test for any guy my sisters and I brought home for Thanksgiving or any visiting male relatives or friends. My father would recruit all available able-bodied men to help him pick up the tables and chairs at the fire station early the morning of Thanksgiving. I’m guessing that usually meant at least 30 chairs and probably four or five tables – and these weren’t the flimsy plastic items you can buy cheap at Walmart or Target. They were heavy metal and wood.

My brothers-in-law were veterans at the task and took it in stride. But, the 10 years he was around, Lloyd also endeared himself to my father by being a hard worker and having a good sense of humor, even when he was carrying six heavy chairs at a time.

Daddy also served as the social director during Thanksgiving week, even though he also had to work in the store. He ferried out-of-town guests to remote parts of the county to watch cane syrup being made from sugar cane, to see the shrimp boats in the remote fishing villages 40 miles to the east of us, or to any other Wayne County versions of tourist attractions.

And there were always new guests for Thanksgiving, which was served early afternoon, after the parade, but before most of the football games got started. While many of the attendees stayed the same, each year brought a new cast for the supporting roles. Someone was always accompanied by their future spouse – or sometimes someone who didn’t make the cut. You knew it was really serious when the future in-laws came. Over the years, I brought many guests – from boyfriends, to my first husband, to friends of every stripe. So did my sisters and everyone else.

(One year, I invited a friend and her boyfriend, the son of a venerable Democratic congressman, which sparked a myriad of reactions and debate from my uncles and great-uncles across the political spectrum.)

In reality, the best Thanksgivings were the ones where everyone, or almost everyone, came – the relatives from Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Florida, and points beyond. Of course, we were thrilled to have my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived an hour away, but the pleasure of being with family you don’t see that often took it to another level. It didn’t matter if the decision to attend was last-minute – how many times did my father joke, “Well, we’ll just put some more water in the soup,” as if there was any chance we didn’t have enough food – or if the guest was a stranger known only to the person who brought him or her. They all became family soon enough.

The memory that pulls at my heart the most was when everything was ready, and we were anticipating the arrival of the guests. We’d hear the crunch of the tires on the fallen leaves, and Mama would look at the living room window and announce, “They’re here,” her face flushed from excitement and the last-minute kitchen preparations. She would run outside to greet the newcomers, my father close behind. It didn’t matter if she had seen the people a day ago or a decade ago; she was thrilled to have them at her house. It also was of no concern if her hair was askew and she had flour on her cheek; it wasn’t about her, she didn’t care about being “just so,” as she would put it.  None of that mattered if you got to spend time with family and friends who are like family.

Just as the guest list changed slightly from year to year, so did the food. And I’m not just talking about how I started making stuffed mushrooms when I was in college, or how Mama almost always tried out a new cake recipe she had discovered. As my sister, several of my cousins, and eventually I started keeping kosher, the Thanksgiving meal transformed. At that point, at least one of the turkeys was kosher, cooked in a new pan in an oven that had been self-cleaned. The milk and cream in the side dishes were often replaced by non-dairy coffee creamer, in respect of the prohibition of mixing meat and milk at the same meal. Some of the dishes that couldn’t be made “fit,” the translation of kosher, were simply dropped from the lineup. How those dishes, including pickled shrimp, ever came to be served in the first place is a topic for a different blog entry.

My mother still baked an array of cakes, but made sure everyone knew which ones were pareve (neither dairy nor meat) and which ones included dairy products. There truly was something for everyone.

As memorable as the food was, the stories were also unforgettable. My favorite is the time that Mama became fascinated by an apple side dish that included the liquor applejack. Many years later, when I had a vacation home in Hendersonville, NC, which is a major area for apple-growing, I learned that applejack was considered the first native spirit of the United States. In recent years, with the comeback of artisan alcoholic beverages, it has become possible to find high-end versions of them. That was not the case back in the 1960s, however.

My mother had her heart set on making that dish, and applejack wasn’t available in the small town where we lived. So, one day when I was off from school, my father and I went to Savannah in search of some. I was maybe 10 or 11 and got a lot of education that day about the underbelly of society. At the time, applejack, which is 40% alcohol, was the kind of cheap liquor sold in iffy neighborhoods on racks that also featured Mad Dog 20/20, Thunderbird, or Wild Irish Rose. We hadn't realized that.

We started at a fancy liquor store and were referred to one on the other side of the tracks. When we walked in, my father looked stricken. Here he was holding the hand of a little girl in an establishment filled with some very questionable characters. I’d never seen him move so fast, as he found a bottle of applejack, grabbed it, paid for it in cash, got us into the car, and drove away as quickly as possible. He urged me not to tell Mama what we had seen, and I didn’t until I was an adult.

I’m not sure what happened when she made the stewed apples. Maybe she was unaware of the alcohol content, used too much liquor, or enough of it didn’t boil off. But let’s just say that there were a lot of very relaxed people at that Thanksgiving, and not a speck of apples left.

Those days produce a kaleidoscope of recollections for me: The kids’ table which often resembled feeding time at the zoo; my Bubbe holding court next to the head of the table, exclaiming about the deliciousness of every dish she tried; Uncle Irv, the husband of my father’s sister Bea, singing operatically; my nieces and nephew running and playing in the expansive back yard; Uncle Ben, my mother’s brother, joking that there wasn’t enough food and he would have to find a McDonalds on the way home; Uncle Dane and the other men trying to stay awake for the football games when the tryptophan kicked in; we kids helpingt Earlene clean up as quickly as possible, so she could get her turkey from the oven at our house and go home for her own Thanksgiving celebration.

One of my very favorite memories was about what traditionally occurred in the late afternoon. After most of the relatives had headed home or settled in at our house, and the borrowed tables and chairs had been returned to the fire department, my parents’ local friends would drop in for cake and coffee.  There would be a steady stream of people oohing and aahing over the sideboard of cakes. Most didn’t have a big hunk of one type but took slivers of several. We would all sit at the table and visit. As one group left, another would quickly fill the chairs. Being in south Georgia, most people followed the schedule we did of having Thanksgiving midday; it wasn’t like we attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and couldn’t put the turkey in until we got home.

Needless to say, by the time everyone headed out, the family wasn't in the mood for much dinner. I might have had a turkey sandwich sometime in the late afternoon, but usually, just before bed, I savored my cheesecake slice. (The very thought of eating that much sugar and fat before bed gives me heartburn now.)

It was important to get to bed because the next day was a busy one at Mooney’s Department Store. The phrase Black Friday didn’t start being used for retail sales until the 1980s, but the day after Thanksgiving always was the official kick-off of the Christmas shopping season. The next month was critical to my parents’ livelihood.

I was still awake when most of the house guests headed for bed, always having had similar sleep habits to my mother. (I still follow her schedule of going to bed about 11:30 or 12 and getting up about 8.) So, when she showered and put on her nightgown and bathrobe, she often would sit with me in the living room to debrief on the Thanksgiving Day events. Usually, it was lots of laughter as we remembered the events of the day, although she often was too hard on herself about every gelatin mold or other dish that didn’t come out just right. On a few occasions, there were some tears. Maybe someone had a little too much to drink and said something they shouldn’t have. Possibly, someone had discovered they had a health issue and had shared it with the family. Or, maybe there was bad blood between one relative and another.

Mama had very little tolerance for discord. No one really described it this way back then, but she was an empath. If there was any pain or sorrow or hard feelings around her, she felt it deeply. (Luckily for her, my father had an amazing ability to speak straight and get people to make up when they had a disagreement.)

When we finished talking, and she hugged me before heading to bed, I would get a whiff of her Jean Nate powder. I listened to her footsteps as she walked down the hall and could hear my father snoring when she opened the door to their bedroom. Sometimes I would sit for a few more minutes, wondering what it would be like when all of this was gone, what the future would bring.

By the last decade of the 20^th century, hosting Thanksgiving had gotten too much for my parents. My father’s Parkinson’s disease made him increasingly uncomfortable in crowds. My mother had some health issues, too. My immediate family started primarily celebrating it at my sisters’ houses. I hosted in 1992 in my house on Virginia Avenue in Atlanta to introduce everyone to my fiancé, Marc.

By 1996, my parents and both of my sisters and their husbands were living in Spartanburg, SC, while Marc and I were in Atlanta. My father died in 1997, and my mother five years later, in 2022.

In 2008, I left my corporate job and started a home-based medical writing and editing business, which wasn’t fabulous timing with the Great Recession. After a few years, I actually became more successful on my own than I had been in corporate America; however, Marc’s financial advising business was going well. We thought it would be fun to try and resurrect the big family Thanksgivings. Marc always hated that he had missed the extravaganzas at the house in Jesup.

We started small, but the crowd coming to Dunwoody had grown to nearly 50 people by 2013, when our Aunt Doris celebrated her 90^th birthday Thanksgiving weekend. Some of the guests were my first cousins thrice removed, and my great-nieces and nephews were playing with third cousins. Eventually, as my generation aged, fewer and fewer of the family wanted to make the trip to Atlanta, and the effort eventually petered out. Even if that hadn’t happened, the COVID-19 pandemic certainly would have put an end to it in 2020.

There isn’t much ritual to my Thanksgiving these days. I’m fortunate to have had multiple invitations this year from friends, but I did what I’ve done the past few years: I had the turkey meal at a close friend’s house at night after having brunch that morning at the home of my cousins.

During brunch, we talked a lot about the past Thanksgivings. My first cousins and I reminisced about the good old days when Thanksgiving was in Jesup, and the sideboard appeared to almost collapse from the weight of my mother’s incredible cakes. Their daughter, now middle-aged, told her new husband about the favorite Thanksgivings she remembers – the ones Marc and I hosted at our house in Dunwoody. She said it was sad that no one in her generation was able to take up the banner and continue the bit Thanksgiving tradition.

Thrilled that she had such good memories of the events at my house, I smiled and explained that it wasn’t so easy to do that. Hosting that many people was expensive and it required a large house and a willing partner, I told her. Plus, her parents chimed in, people are spread out now and have so many competing activities. I agreed. Times change.

That Friday night, the Sabbath, I had a special dinner – turkey from a half breast I had roasted, gravy, a sweet potato, green beans, and cranberry sauce. The tryptophan in the turkey made me drowsy, and my dog Lily and I went to bed early. It had been chilly all day, and it was no time at all before I fell asleep under the warm covers. My dreams were disjointed, as they often are when you sleep too heavily and then awaken. All I can remember is that I dreamed about my mother’s cakes – pink, green, yellow, and white – standing tall, their icing as fluffy as sea foam.  

“Don’t worry, Mama,” I said in a whisper as I drifted back to sleep. “They were perfect. It was all perfect.”