Thanksgiving is over. The leftover turkey, yams, stuffing, and pumpkin pie have probably been gobbled up, and yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent. But I am thinking of past Thanksgivings. So many wonderful memories of family, friends, and food. There was one Thanksgiving, though, that stands out. That was the Thanksgiving we spent with the Christians.
My first husband had to go to Cape Canaveral for a rocket launch, and so we decided to pack up our three year old and our ten month old and fly to Florida for Thanksgiving. His company had a three bedroom apartment on the beach that we could use. I was looking forward to going to a restaurant for our turkey dinner, but we were invited to share a meal with the Christians. Mr Christian worked for the same company as my husband and was based near the Cape.
The first intimation that this might be a different sort of Thanksgiving came when my husband called to get directions to the Christian's house and was greeted with "Praise the Lord!". Now it is a good thing to praise the Lord, but we were used to people doing that in church or when they were saying grace or in their private prayers. Things got stranger when we arrived at the Christian's house. Mr. C had a daughter from his previous marriage, a delightful girl of about ten or eleven years, but I was shocked by how harshly Mrs. "Praise the Lord" Christian treated the child. Mr. C was telling us about how he used to perform with a group of folksingers, and when he saw that we were interested, he offered to play one of their records for us. He looked and looked for them, and finally asked his wife if she knew where his records were. "They're not Christian music," she said. "I put them in the attic."
By this time, we were feeling quite awkward, but then the other guests arrived, folks from their church. Mrs. C proudly introduced one of the men as being the person who held the record for killing the most wild turkeys in the United States. I didn't ask if the turkey we were about to eat was one of his trophies. Needless to say, the evening just continued to go downhill - and the food wasn't very good, either.
Thinking about that evening, I am reminded of this verse from Matthew 23: “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long".