Each month, a member of the board will share a reflection on the Soul Matters monthly theme. The theme for September is Welcome. This month’s post is offered by Brian Zais.
My maternal grandparents’ house in Stanley, Wisconsin, was the embodiment of welcoming at Thanksgiving. We never quite knew until the end of the meal how many people would be there. We had the usual family members (Mom and her 3 brothers, plus their significant others and kids) that were there most years. My great grandmother—known to the family as “Little Grandma” due to her diminutive stature, not her personality—was there until her sudden death after one infamous Thanksgiving dinner that became a warning in our family: don’t take a third helping of squash. (There’s a longer story there…) That was 18 people already.
And then there were many family friends that came some years. My grandfather and uncles were all avid deer hunters that were regulars at deer camp in northern Wisconsin along with several of my uncles’ friends. In Wisconsin, deer season starts the weekend before Thanksgiving and ends the weekend after. When a majority of your family is at deer camp, having Thanksgiving on the Thursday smack in the middle of deer season is a non-starter; the McCaffery Thanksgiving was always held on the Saturday afterward. That allowed the hunters most of the season at camp. They’d break camp on Saturday morning after a week of hunting, come home, clean up, and Thanksgiving dinner would be that afternoon. But it meant that their hunting friends would have missed their own family’s Thanksgiving (held on Thursday for some reason…who does that???), so they often joined us on Saturday. That might add another 4 or 5 people.
Some of the extended clan (my grandfather had 3 siblings) might be in town, adding some great aunts and uncles and extended cousins. There was sometimes a man (usually bringing his family) whom my grandparents all but adopted when he was a kid in their small town growing up with an abusive family.
To feed a crowd that big, you need a lot of food. Which means you need a lot of storage for food prepared in advance (so many pies!) and lots of extra oven space for things cooked just in time, especially when your primary oven is completely full with an enormous turkey. The neighbors’ ovens (and porches and refrigerators and pantries) were pressed into service as overflow. So the neighbors sometimes joined the celebration.
And then sometimes there were more random, unexpected guests. One year, the mailman came to the door to deliver a package just as we were sitting down and was persuaded to stay for the meal. It didn’t matter who you were or how tangentially you were connected to someone at 240 Emery St. in Stanley, you were welcome at that table. And the “table” was really one long thing comprised of the main dining room table, the kitchen table, 2 card tables, and anything else roughly the right height tacked onto the end to fit more people. Chairs came from every room of the house and often from the neighbors. (Eating at a table while sitting in a rocking chair is an interesting challenge.) If someone showed up that wasn’t part of the original estimated count, or even partway through the meal, we just pressed tighter together and crammed in another chair. You learned to eat with your elbows tucked to your sides!
Our faith instructs us to be welcoming to all. There are very few situations I can think of more welcoming than sharing a meal completely without reservation with anyone and everyone who shows up. May we all practice welcoming as fully as my grandparents!
— Brian Zais
UUCM Board of Trustees Member
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