My family has a lot of traditions that we tend to uphold, most of them being ones that involve all of us being in the kitchen for hours and hours upon end, resulting in a gratuitous amount of food being made in order to bring to someone’s house, usually family or family friends. As long as I can remember, my parents (especially my mother) have made it a point to take people food as gifts almost all the time, no matter the circumstance, in practically every circumstance. Weddings, birthdays, family get-togethers, general get-togethers, for people in mourning, and even as a thank you for helping out only scrapes the surface of the numerous reasons and events. The holidays also would be a time where my family would get together to cook, to take food to and eat at a friend’s house, or to host people ourselves (said people would likely also be bringing food). The holidays that stand out to me the most in this vein are Thanksgiving and Christmas. These two holidays have the most defined food related tradition: every year we spend Thanksgiving at a friend's house (for the sake of this blog post I’ll call them “friend C”, and then in a month for Christmas we host that same family at our house. While this tradition is one that I believe only started not that long ago, we’ve known Friend C’s family for a decade or possibly even longer, so at this point I know them well enough that they feel like a part of my actual family (which is probably helped by the fact that Friend C and their family have stopped by at a few of my family reunions to be honest).
In the past year (2023) this tradition continued, with my family spending the bulk of Thanksgiving day in the kitchen cooking, and then arriving at Friend C’s house that evening at a time I like to call fashionably late✨ (about half an hour after the originally planned time). It felt a little less lively than usual this year because both my dad and my older sister had gone to Germany for the week, but I still had a fun time there, and ate lots of pumpkin pie. Christmas was also about the same as usual, and since my dad and sibling had arrived back from Germany they also got to make the seafood lasagna and sweet corn casserole (dad and sibling respectively) that is near and dear to my heart. The rest of my family either helped with other people’s dishes or made their own, and I made a fruit cake for friend C’s mother’s birthday. Combined with the very very large piles of dishes to be washed in the aftermath of all that cooking, I barely sat down until Friend C’s family arrived. That night was spent with most of the kids in the house traveling between watching tv and movies in the basement and returning upstairs to get more food.
As everyone grows up I know it’s not likely that we’ll be able to reliably get together as often as we were able to when we were younger, especially with how even I’m about to go to college in the next 2 years. However, I’d like to be able to continue being able to meet up with people and eat with them. My memory now isn’t the best, but from what I can remember from my childhood a lot of my fonder memories are from times that my family had get-togethers with other family friends. And when I grow up and make my own connections later in life I would like to be able to help create those good memories for other people as well (though with the amount of dish-washing those events I might just end up getting takeout in the future)
