With that being said, it’s late November and we’ve had one cold snap which was so nice- all 46 hours of it. You’ve never heard such groaning as the summer people let out when they had to share the weather pattern for almost a couple of days. Here we approach the Thanksgiving holiday and the dawn of the Christmas season and cue another Mississippi heat wave. How I do love the South, but it makes it hard for its cold-loving citizens to attain the holiday spirit. 

With just a week to go, women everywhere are starting to feel the pressure of the Thanksgiving dinner. The shopping and dicing and baking and arranging. You’ll be squeezing card tables in corners and pulling chairs out of the attic and scoping out unsuspecting plant materials for your centerpieces. With your Karo syrup, french fried onions, and sweetened condensed milk at the ready, you think you’re just preparing a big meal for your family, but you’re really cementing core memories for the younger generations who will sit at your tables. You’re setting an unattainable standard by which future Thanksgivings will be judged long after you’re gone. You’re creating a permanent snapshot in younger minds of a beautiful moment in time- one they’ll wish, over and over, they could relive as their years accumulate. Their memories won’t just be of the food -which is the thing dreams are made of- but it’s the home, the greeting at the door, the candles, the special touches, the voice saying the blessing, the familiar smells, and the feeling of being enveloped in love. It’s the warmth of a crazy, wonderful mixture of generations, personalities and relationships together in one place and the feeling of belonging there. 

So, as you traipse around town in search of the right bird and the perfect napkins, remember what you’re doing is so powerful. You’re not just feeding bellies, you’re filling their memory tanks with loving tradition that will warm them when the world feels cold— and even when they’re your age, they’ll still be able to feel the warmth of what you did while you thought you were just making a nice dinner. Carry on, ladies. You’re doing important work. 

JONI