“Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” This poem, published 180 years ago and later turned into song, sums up my childhood memories of Thanksgiving, though our destination was as likely Aunt Edith’s house in upstate New York as my grandmother’s. Never mind that the original poem read, “to grandfather’s house we go”; in our family, the matriarchs ruled Thanksgiving Day. And not just because food was involved. They held sacred the covenant mandate to bind family together.
It wasn’t exactly by sleigh that we traveled either. There were rivers to cross and woods to pass, but we went by car and mostly on busy highways. Even so, anticipation marked every mile of the trail, warm smiles and holiday smells guaranteed on the other end.
My Grandma Kenyon lived 3 hours north of where I grew up, in the rubber-reclaiming mill town of Butler. Thanksgivings, when we landed there, centered around a long table – or tables set up end-to-end, stretching through the great room. Multiple, bright florescent-lit fish tanks, with neon tetras, angelfish, common guppies, and orange swordtail fish, added a sidelight glow.
Aunt Edith, truly the matriarch on my Dad’s side of the family, was the postmistress in the one-horse town of McGraw. McGraw had been known for its corset manufacturing from the late 19th century. My Uncle Floyd, Aunt Edith’s half-brother, rose from floor sweeper to owner of one of those factories that eventually produced something other than corsets – metal parts, if I remember rightly.
Both these tiny industrial hamlets – Butler in New Jersey and McGraw in New York – were nestled in the folds of the Appalachians. Butler, just off Route 23 and centered transitionally between the sprawling megapolis of New York City and rural Sussex County where I was born, had a ruddy complex. McGraw, quieter and quainter, evinced a quintessential early Americana feeling, especially when it snowed.
Ah, the snow! It filled the air with magic and came down thick and pillowy. McGraw was more likely than Butler to have snow for Thanksgiving, which made getting there dicey, but being there all the more fun. We’d bundle up and climb the steep hill behind Aunt Edith’s house to visit the sugar maple trees and look out over the sleepy, whitened community.
McGraw, older than the poem, has shrunk a tad from when Aunt Edith knew everyone and their mail. Yet, just as it has for more than a century, it still hovers around a thousand souls.
Aunt Edith was my grandfather’s half-sister. Except for my grandpa, Nelson, all that side were respectable Presbyterians. He alone with grandma scandalized the family by becoming Pentecostal pastors, and poor ones at that. He spent much of his adult life in what we now call bi-vocational ministry, starting and rebuilding churches in underserved communities.
But Aunt Edith had a way of bringing disconnected sides of the family together. Our side of Pentecostal preachers was always welcomed at her house – and at her lakeside cabin in Ontario, Canada. Eventually Aunt Edith bridged the faith gap herself when she started following PTL Club in its heyday on TV.
In my 20s, Aunt Edith’s two-story house, shoehorned between the road and the sugar maple hill, became a frequent stopover place for me as I journeyed around the country in my itinerant work in a ministry called Campus 80s, an extension of Chi Alpha Campus Ministry. Hearty meals were always a given and the house was forever homey – just don’t mess with Aunt Edith’s cats who really ruled the house, something Uncle Lester, her husband, was quick to point out.
Oddly, that house is forever linked in my memory with Keith Green, the radical singer and songwriter from the 70s, for it was on one of my visits to Aunt Edith’s that I heard the news that Green had died in a plane crash. As I sat at Aunt Edith’s dining room table taking care of correspondence, I heard the startling news come over the TV in the living room.
A native of that other part of New York – the City – Green had traveled far from his Brooklyn Jewish roots into the 60s music scene, Eastern mysticism, and the West Coast “free love” culture until he finally encountered the teachings of the gospel and landed in East Texas. In the late 70s and early 80s, he became a spokesperson for a radical commitment to Jesus and the Great Commission, inspiring countless youth to give it all to reach the lost far from the comforts of home.
Although that era was all about journeys and moving for me, Aunt Edith never moved away from that confluence of seven valleys that funneled snowstorms into deep piles. In her retirement years, she did visit such places as Alaska, Hudson Bay, Canada, and, of course, her beloved cabin on the lake.
She was proud of family, in a good, wholesome way. Learning of my interest in family genealogy, she took me to all the Kenyon, Zirbel, Nye, and Comstock sites she knew of in Upstate New York – and even accompanied me to Campbell and Breece sites from grandma’s side of the family. If you were kin to kin, you were kin.
My great-grandfather, Winfield Lathrop Kenyon, had died when my grandpa and his brother Floyd were wee lads. They moved to Delaware where my great-grandmother, born a Nye, found work, hard as it was, on the DuPont Farms. They eventually returned to New York, and she remarried, becoming a Zirbel. Aunt Edith and her full brother, Lloyd, joined the family shortly thereafter.
To visit Aunt Edith’s on Thanksgiving was to encounter the meaning of bounty as well as of family. The table was loaded with stuffed turkey, roast duck, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce with “sticks and twigs,” homemade rolls and jams, fruit- and vegetable-filled jellos, all kinds of other succulent dishes, and completed with sweet potato casserole (my dad’s favorite). There, too, I discovered the old-fashioned delight of minced meat pie. Pies were king on that day, pumpkin and especially apple, being as we were in the heart of apple country.
We’d gather around the big people’s table to pray and then scatter to tables set up in various rooms. I remember my older cousin Mary Jane being one of the big people at the kids’ table. Was she banished or just sent there to keep an eye on us? We both had our suspicions.
Football reigns supreme in many homes on Thanksgiving Day, but I don’t recall it a tradition in ours. What was tradition was tying together the news from the various strands of the extended clan. Each absent or deceased family member was referenced as if as a memento taken down from the fireplace mantle, dusted, passed around, and returned to their quiet place of honor. All such relationships, often obscure to my young mind, fit in somewhere in the family lore. All reminded us of how interconnected and embraced we were.
My grandma gave up hosting big Thanksgiving gatherings when she moved to their tiny mobile home in Lakeland, FL. I don’t know when Aunt Edith stopped her hosting; I’d moved overseas with my young family and, when we did make it back to the States for the holidays, it was Thanksgiving at my parents’ in New Jersey and Christmas at my inlaws’ in Washington State – or vice versa.
The last I saw my Aunt Edith must have been at my sister’s wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, I once again shared a table with my cousin, Mary Jane. We’d come a long way from the kids’ table. Aunt Edith, ever tall and stately, ever the matriarch, was recognized along with Uncle Lester, who stood much shorter by her side. They passed away not long after.
Thanksgiving, the U.S. holiday, means different things to different people. Years after those earlier holiday memories, I found myself back in my hometown speaking at an interdenominational gathering at St. John Boscoe Catholic Church.
The big event in town on TG Day, honored by my family’s attendance, was the Millville-Vineland High School football game, the longest continuous such rivalry in the nation. And, of course, waiting for us at mom’s house was stuffed turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, all the fixings, and, most importantly, sweet potato casserole topped with crisply-melted marshmallows.
These days Thanksgiving as a holiday seems hemmed in by Halloween and Christmas and overshadowed by American football. Attempts to redeem U.S. history by painting rosy pictures of Pilgrims and Native Americans feasting together are unconvincing, like tarnished silver plates on the mantel. Although religious Thanksgiving gatherings are increasingly rare, lyrics and words to the Thanksgiving Hymn, “We Gather Together,” still leap readily to my mind, a reminder of how essential community is to the holiday.
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His name, He forgets not his own.
Whatever the changes, the day remains for me centered on giving thanks, something a bit awkward if sorely needed in our age of overwhelming abundance. As we momentarily stop to thank our Creator and to remember those less fortunate, it is good to ponder that nothing we have is of our own making and that all we can claim as our own is, at most, fleeting.
Even the idea of family has taken a beating in our society in recent years. People aren’t as connected, or they are connected in so many fractured ways that no one can keep up. Unfortunately for many, the holiday is a reminder that family ties can be painful.
Even with all the holiday busyness crowding in, we as a society still manage to pause, reflect on, and respond to the reality that so many others around us go without connectedness or a good, hot meal. When I ran a food pantry, I would tell people that hunger is a 365-day-a-year concern, not just something to pay attention to on the fourth Thursday of November or the 25th of December.
For generations of my family, meeting the needs of the underserved and under-connected has been a year-round mission. My grandparents may have been poor by certain standards, but they were ever looking out for those in need – finding homes for houseless youth, packing medical bandages for leper colonies in Africa, gathering food for hungry families, caring for young and old. They led their children and children’s children to reach out to those in need, advocate for justice and systemic change in city halls and state capitols, and share God’s abundantly good news around the globe.
Thanksgiving shouldn’t be special as if it were exceptional, as if the rest of the year we fail to give thanks or connect with family or serve others in need. It is best celebrated as a time-honored reminder that giving, sharing, connecting, and worshipping is the life we are called to.
This season, Kim and I will gather with half of our kids, just our boys this time around. Robert will drive down from the Tacoma area; Stephen from his parish in Portland metro. Our girls are scattered: Hannah is serving on the other side of the globe, Hope and Michael are visiting his family in Sacramento. As for our more extended family, we’ll have to wait for other occasions, perhaps next wedding or funeral.
Meanwhile, at our table, we will pause, give thanks, and enjoy stuffed turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy. Oh, and sweet potatoes. Did I say they were dad’s favorite? I’ll have an extra scoop in your memory, Dad!
For your bonus listening pleasure, https://youtu.be/RvhIaFtmpkU?si=A6Y_L8oS2u3ABXPy. “We Gather Together”: Originally a Dutch patriotic song, written by Adrianus Valerius ca: 1600, translated by Theodore Baker (1894), adapted over time as a hymn of and for Thanksgiving.
This blog, “On a Journey in the Borderlands,” is published twice-weekly at howardkenyon.com.
Photos: The Thanksgiving Matriarchs: Aunt Edith Zirbel Benedict, Grandma Eleanor Campbell Kenyon
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