Our holidays still have cheer

My nephews, Caydyn and Rylan, help make breakfast Thanksgiving morning in 2016.

Thanksgiving 2020 was a little different for my family this year, like a lot of families.
To protect some of our more vulnerable family members, we scaled back and added some safety and social distancing to the small gathering that we did have.
It meant setting up small heaters on my sheltered patio, so we could visit outside with separate households.
As “different” as the 2020 celebration was, in some ways, it really wasn’t that different.
Since my sister and I moved to Cape Girardeau for college, my family’s holidays always have been kind of on-the-go.
We’re spread across multiple cities, but fortunately all within driving distance (back then it was four hours, on two-lane roads. Today, it’s half that, so much easier).
We always seem to be fortunate enough to celebrate together on the day of the holiday, but who hosts is entirely dependent on everyone’s schedules for that year.
When my sister and I had our attic apartment in Cape, and later a small (very small) house in Scott City, my parents frequently came to us because of our school and work schedules.
Those early attempts at hosting a big family meal met with varying degrees of success.
There was the year (years?) when the turkey wasn’t ready until pretty late in the evening. I think one year it was 10 p.m. before the dinner was ready. I don’t remember what went wrong that day, but I remember we all laughed about it, then and now.
There were the yeast rolls my sister tried to make following our grandmother’s recipe. They weren’t quite edible, and neither was the squash soup I tried to contribute that year.
But, there were never any complaints about the lateness of the meal, and everyone always tried their best to make it seem like everything tasted good, even when it was just a brave front.
So, the fact that there are challenges isn’t new. The fact that it’s not quite the same as last year isn’t all that different either.
The laughter is certainly the same.
The missing faces this year was a little more of a struggle, but we’ll make up for it soon.