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Thanksgiving is sort of an odd holiday for me. I love the feasts, but the day itself was never particularly important in my family. We don’t have a big extended family — I’m an only child, my mother is as well, and my father has one sister who never married. My parents had cousins, but they lived far away and we were never very close to them. On top of that, my parents’ relationship was, er, strained and they divorced when I was in high school.

This means that Thanksgiving didn’t really have the traditional “let’s all gather together and be thankful for each other” meaning for us. At best, we were thankful that nobody was throwing anything or hitting anybody.

Now that I’m living in Pittsburgh, Thanksgiving is becoming more important. We do the big family dinner each year with Laura’s family. She has a half-dozen siblings, so the Thanksgiving feast is the sort of pile-all-the-tables-together extravaganza I’d heard about but never seen as a kid. We all sat around one table, even if we were eating at my grandparents’ house, and there was no point to a kids’ table that would only have consisted of me. Laura’s immediate family alone is twice the size of my usual holiday dinners, and there are usually at least as many guests and friends as family members.

So, I’ve gone from 3-5 person dinners to 16-20 people. It’s been an interesting change. Even if family relationships get strained, it’s nice to visit and see everyone, talk, and eat. In the six or seven years I’ve been eating there, I’ve grown very used to it.

It does feel a bit odd to essentially be hanging on to someone else’s family tradition, though. I wonder how it’ll change over time as Laura’s siblings have families of their own and things shift from one central meal at her mother’s house to an assortment of different holiday celebrations. It’s already happening — her brothers are both married, and one is spending Thanksgiving with his in-laws.

I imagine we’ll eventually build our own personal Thanksgiving tradition, but at times I feel like I don’t have much to build on there. Will I invent traditions from whole cloth, just picking and choosing things that sound good? If I do, is there anything wrong with that?

I’m not a religious person, so I’ve never expected holiday traditions to have any deep significance. I’m mostly fine with “well, it makes us happy” as a reason for things, but it can feel a little arbitrary sometimes.

The reason I’m thinking about this, in addition to it being seasonally appropriate, is that Laura has gotten in touch with my aunt Bonnie, who I haven’t seen since my parents split up. Today she sent us a picture of Thanksgiving in her family from 1959:

My grandfather on that side died very young, so I never really knew that side of my family as a family — it was always my grandmother, the funny and perilously thin retired nurse who seemed to live on Campbell’s soup and Marlboros, my angry father, and my quiet but brilliant aunt who spoke countless languages. They were all interesting people, but I’d never really had a sense of their interactions and relationships with each other. I tended to see them all individually, or maybe in pairs — my mother and I would visit my grandmother and also see Bonnie, and so forth.

This glimpse into a family life I still don’t really know anything about fascinates me. Here’s how my aunt describes the picture:

That’s Nat’s grandmother, Lee Cleverly Lanza, who was a very good looking woman. Across the table is Carmelo (Charlie) Lanza, the oldest of the four Lanza siblings who came from Catania, Sicily, as children. Nat’s grandfather, Salvatore (Sam) Lanza was the youngest of the four. Note the unusual pink and blue color scheme of the dining room. This odd combination was supposed to “lower the ceiling” visually, according to Lee C (my mother), but I never quite got why that would be a good idea.

Some day my grandchildren will be looking at a similar picture and be fascinated by the strangeness of it. I wonder what they’ll see.