Mom had a gift for making everything wonderful, no matter what holiday it was. Thanksgiving and Christmas were the two best because her cooking and baking skills were legendary.

I learned how to make coffee cake by watching mom. By the time I was fifteen, I had taken over the task of creating the favorite breakfast treat. I have surely baked over a hundred of them in the past fifty plus years. I think the recipe originated with my Aunt Maxye, who was my Grandma Ola’s sister. Aunt Maxye always wore bright red lipstick, something my grandma never did. She called herself “the kissing aunt”, and she planted one on anybody who came for a visit.

Eating coffee cake was a production all its own. A big piece was buttered on all sides, then each bite was perfectly combined with a sip of coffee. Nothing happened on Thanksgiving or Christmas until we sat at the kitchen table together and had a piece or two. When our kids were growing up, I teased them on Christmas morning by saying we couldn’t open any presents until we all ate a piece of coffee cake and talked for at least an hour.

Preparations for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners began the day before with grinding all the ingredients for cranberry relish. Mom had an old grinder she fastened to the edge of the table. She didn’t trust me to put the berries, apple, and orange in the hopper for fear my fingers might become part of the relish. I turned the crank as she put in the pieces while juice dripped on the floor. I never liked the cranberry relish, but I love it now.

It was my job to crack walnuts for the cottage cheese, pineapple, and PET milk green jello salad, and for the cranberry jello with pineapple. Collecting the necessary walnut pieces for the salads and coffee cake was a tough but important job. I felt compelled to help myself to several samples as I worked.

The huge frozen turkey thawed as it rested in the sink all day. I pulled the bread apart and let it dry out so mom could make her special, delicious, giblet and sage stuffing. It was the perfect blend of thyme, rosemary, sage, pepper, salt, celery, butter, onion, and giblet pieces. I can still smell the amazing aroma filling the house as the stuffed turkey roasted all night long. It’s a miracle anyone in our family survived past the age of ten, with all the rumored horrors resulting from baking a turkey all night long and actually eating anything stuffed in the turkey while it cooked.

I didn’t like sweet potatoes when I was a kid. I think it was a texture thing. I love them now. Mashed potatoes swimming in gravy and a buttered roll to mop up the overflow made for a beautiful dinner plate.

I think the proof of my mom’s impact, as in any mom’s impact on Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners is the effort by children to make the same dinners, with the same ingredients, with the same tastes, and the same feelings, forever. I’ll never forget the first time we roasted a whole turkey. It was a twenty pounder, there were only three of us at home, and one of us wasn’t even a year old. We had turkey leftovers for two weeks. But we made that perfect turkey dinner, with real stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, cranberry jello, pickles, olives, Christmas cookies, coffee cake, and lots and lots of coffee.

Thanks mom, miss you.