When Eric and I got married, we agreed that Thanksgivings would be spent with my family and Christmas with his. His mom always throws a big Christmas Eve shindig with a buffet and lots of family; my family has the large gathering in November. It seemed simple and self-evident to spend each holiday with the family that prized it more. Interestingly, it looks as if this year we will spend four days on each family. In years past, we've taken the long way back from Christmas, detouring through my home, but this year it's not going to happen. So Thanksgiving will be it, and I plan to relish every moment.

I vaguely remember having the Thanksgiving bash at my house when I was very small. My mom has three sister and two brothers, and the families of those plus a few of my grandma's siblings didn't make for too much of a burden for a while, I guess. I remember sitting at a little picnic table with my cousin Jason, who was a month younger than me; we were the biggest bookworms in the world, and insisted that we were going to marry each other when we grew up. (Hey, my grandfather's parents were first cousins...seriously!) Unfortunately, he married another woman a couple of years ago, breaking my heart.

As I gained more and more cousins, my mom couldn't keep up with supplying the clan with turkey, so we had to come up with a new plan. The New, Nontraditional Rollins Clan Thanksgiving Celebration took shape: since we had people coming from the north and the south, we decided to meet in the middle, at Washinton D.C. For years, we met every Thanksgiving morning at one of the Smithsonian museums. Then we went for Thanksgiving smorgasbord, traditionally at the Horn and Horn in Arlington, Virginia. Yummy!

Then the Horn and Horn went belly up... The relatives from the south stopped coming... The younger kids grew up and a new flock of tiny babies entered the picture, making longer trips less enjoyable...

Now we meet at my grandmother's and wing it. Last year we had dinner at a buffet restaurant, and hot dogs roasted over the garbage heap later that night. Then I think some of the cousins went on tractor rides up over the mountains. Ah, West by God Virginia!

Seriously, I love visiting my grandmother's farm. There's a lot of history there, but most of it sounds pretty unbelievable. When Grandma and Grandpa Rollins moved the family to the plot of land, there was no house. They lived in a barn, which they called "the Castle." Grandpa had a hole for the foundation dug, but no construction ever happened; eventually, they refilled the hole and put a trailer on the spot.

(Anecdotal trailer story: when Eric and I were dating, we went to Grandma's for Easter. My cousin and her family, also West Virginianites, had just gotten a new trailer and were giving tours to the relatives. Eric asked where we were going, and I said, "To see Vanessa's new trailer." To which Vanessa angrily responded, "It's not a trailer, it's a house!" Pause, more calmly, "It's a double-wide.")

Mom and her sibs love to talk and joke about life in the Castle; snakes, bugs, and birds just loved spending time there, if the children did not. Heat was provided via a stove pipe reaching up through the floor of the kids' room. When my aunts laugh about those years, it's an edgy kind of laugh - not really humored at all. I know my mom, at least, still has nightmares about that point in her life. Grandpa was not really a pleasant man, and Mom will occasionally reveal to me stories about the atrocities she and her siblings suffered at his hands. I imagine he must have felt remorse for all the things he did when he stopped drinking and even came to know God not long before he died; nevertheless, his remorse doesn't take away my mom's haunted memories.