Family Matters

I love spending time with my family. There must be a thousand of us. Each year we all get together and celebrate the holidays. We decided a few years ago to all come together and eat Thanksgiving dinner together. We all usually eat with our immediate families and visit the rest of the family after dinner. For the past two years we have been all eating together. There are so many of us to all fit in one house so we rented a local high school cafeteria to accommodate all of us. I didn't make it to the first dinner but I was glad to be able to go to the last one. We all had a great time and the food was on point!! Each family brought their Thanksgiving meals to the cafeteria. We had smoked turkeys, fired turkeys, honey glazed hams, macaroni and cheese, collard, turnip, and mustard greens (I cooked them:) ), stuffing, yams, and much more. Desserts were homemade pound cakes, bread puddings, banana puddings, sweet potato pies, pumpkin pies, chocolate homemade tier cakes, strawberry punch bowl cakes, cheese cakes, holiday tri-color cakes, and assorted chocolates. We had so much food that we all had to give it away to friends that stopped by.

When it's time to celebrate Christmas, we all spend time with our grand mothers and grand fathers. (There are six girls and two boys from my great-grand parents and many kids, great-grands to great-great grands.) In my family, my grand mother is the fourth daughter from my grand parents. We all get together at my grand mother's house on Christmas eve night each year. We have a Christmas party following a reading by her of The Night Before Christmas for the younger grand kids. Then after the reading we all exchange gifts. We return on Christmas day to eat dinner at my grand mother's house.

My family has many traditions. We even get together at my great grand parents house to watch the Martin Luther King, Jr. parade out front of the house. We all cook out in the yard and watch the parade and fry fish. My cousin is the mayor of the town and helps coordinate the parade.

I hope my family will continue to come together and keep the traditions going. I plan to start traditions of my own when I get married and start a family. Mine will be a little different. I want to travel on the holidays and create different memories each year. I have never been out of this state so that will be interesting.