A Socially Distant Thanksgiving

As with so many things this year, Thanksgiving 2020 is different than those that came before. Long-standing family traditions are being put on hold as we gather in smaller groups or just stay home with our immediate family. As I write this, I'm getting ready to go over to my parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner. It will just be me and my parents -- the smallest Thanksgiving of my entire life. My brother and sister-in-law are having dinner with my sister-in-law's twin sister and her husband, so I won't see them today. We had a family Zoom call last night and have texted this morning and that's how you stay connected with your loved ones on a socially distanced Thanksgiving in the middle of a global pandemic.

This is not how Thanksgiving is normally spent. A few years ago, I wrote about the family Christmas traditions, and Thanksgiving has it's own similar set of traditions. Growing up, we spent most Thanksgivings with the Dwyer side of the family. I don't really know why as my Dwyer aunts and uncles would often alternate between the Dwyer side and their in-law side of their families, but probably though the time I was in high school we spent most Thanksgivings with the Dwyers. So some years it was a large gathering like Christmas Eve when my mothers four California siblings (her youngest sister lives in Alaska and seldom came down for Thanksgiving) and their families would gather at someone's house for dinner, and other years it would just be spent with my mom's older sister's family and my grandparents.

Sometime in the late 1980s/early '90s, we started spending Thanksgiving with the Murray side of the family. I suspect this is in part due to my cousins starting to get married and having families of their own -- it was getting to complicated to get together with the Dwyer family and accommodate the various extended families. The Murray side is smaller than the Dwyers, and my cousins on that side started getting married a little later. For the last 10 years or so, we've been spending Thanksgiving at the house of one of my cousins. It's a great evening that usually starts at Ed Murray's Tavern -- the amazing deck/bar my cousin built in his backyard as a memorial to our beloved Uncle Eddie. It's an extended family Thanksgiving as my cousin's in laws are usually in attendance and always full of love and laughs. And the usual Murray Dessert-fest -- cake, pie, ice cream, cookies -- you name it, we've got it! Alas, we won't be gathering there this year.

But back to the earliest Thanksgiving traditions. I suspect some of the reason for spending most Thanksgivings with the Dwyer side of the family in the 1970s and '80s was because my mother's birthday is in the last week of November, so there's usually a bit of a birthday celebration involved as well. That makes for an extra busy Thanksgiving, as well as a couple of special and memorable ones.

As it happened my mother's 40th birthday happened to fall on Thanksgiving Day. Since it was a big milestone birthday, my parents decided to invite both the Dwyer and Murray families to Thanksgiving dinner -- at our house! Mom is one of six children, Dad is one of five. Mom also grew up with her three Pendergast cousins living across the street, so it's more like she was one of nine children growing up. Everyone was invited to dinner. 

A lot of planning and cooperation goes into hosting a big dinner like that, especially when you're having it in your family living room! The first step -- move all of the living room furniture out of the living room! The living room furniture at that time consisted of a couple of love seats and tables, which mostly got moved into the dining room (save the tables that had lamps on them.) Of course that meant the dining room table had move, and it got set up in the entry way between the kitchen and living room. It became the dessert table. Next was setting up the rental tables in the living room and all the chairs. I don't think Mom and Dad rented chairs, but cobbled together a collection between the dining room chairs and folding chairs we had and borrowed folding chairs from other members of the family. We also borrowed a half dozen small benches from a family at St. Dunstan's where my brother and I went to school with two of their children. I'm not quite sure how that came about since neither my brother nor I were particularly friends with those kids, we were just classmates and hung out with different kids.

Once the house was set up, it was time to start cooking. I can't remember now how many turkeys my father cooked, but I would think it was at least two since we had a double oven in our kitchen. Everyone in the family brought things, but my dad did a lot of cooking that year. One of my mother's cousins roasted his first turkey that Thanksgiving as his wife injured her back and wasn't able to prepare the turkey as planned. Among the many desserts was a cake baked by one of my aunts which was in the shape of a turkey and read "Happy Birthday B... you turkey!" My aunt was a little worried that my mom would be upset, but she loved it and laughed.

We had about 40 people for a sit down Thanksgiving dinner that year. All in our living room. I was among the oldest of the youngest generation, so was privileged to have an actual chair to sit on for dinner. Most of the younger kids were squeezed together on one side of the table closest to the fire place and sat along the benches we'd borrowed. I think we even managed to squeeze in a couple of high chairs for the three one-year-olds. It was a cozy fit.

My father's younger brother and his family didn't come for dinner, but arrived in time for dessert. The family that lent us the benches stopped by at some point in the evening as did one of my brother's friends. Cousins on all sides mixed and played while the adults gabbed the evening away. It was a great party.

It was such a great party that 10 years later for my mom's 50th birthday, we decided to do it again! By that time all of the kids we'd been able to squeeze on to benches were teenagers and the family was much too big to fit everyone in our house for a sit down dinner. Fortunately by that time Uncle Eddie was the pastor at St. Gregory's Church in San Mateo, and they had a great parish hall, complete with an industrial kitchen. Uncle Eddie arranged for us to use the hall and again have the Dwyers, Murrays, and Pendergasts for dinner.

The day before, which was my mother's actual birthday, my parents, brother, and I met my aunt Diane and Uncle Eddie at St. Gregory's to set up the tables and chairs and set out some decorations. It was a bit of a hectic day for me as I'd planned to leave work early and run a couple errands before meeting the family, but wound up spending most of the time dealing with having locked my keys in my car at the gas station! Dad was home cooking three turkeys, so couldn't bring me my spare key and my brother was on his way home from college and mom was still at work. Dad called AAA for me, but it was quite a headache!

Thanksgiving day arrived, and this time we had over 60 people for a sit down dinner. Since we were at St. Gregory's already, Uncle Eddie said a mass for the entire family before dinner. Afterwards we took a great photo of everyone in attendance, and it takes some work to identify who in the family is on which side and who married into any of the families. Again, it was a fun evening of visiting with our family and cousins intermingling. The youngest kids found their way into St. Gregory's gym and tossed a basketball around and just generally ran around having fun.

Earlier this week, one of my Pendergast cousins mentioned he had found a video his mother had taken of that Thanksgiving, and it was great seeing everyone (and how young everyone was! I'm now older than my mother was in that video!) 

So this Thanksgiving is quite different. Hopefully next year we'll be able to be together again and celebrate as a whole family. Looking ahead a few years... Mom's 85th birthday is on Thanksgiving, so maybe it's time to start planning for another big family blow out!

Baseball and Family Ties

The Chicago Cubs just won their first World Series since 1908 and as a lifelong baseball fan, I am so happy for their fans who have waited so long. I grew up a fan of the San Francisco Giants who saw their own World Series drought of 56 years (52 of them in San Francisco) end in 2010 and was ecstatic that the team I'd been cheering for my entire life had finally won it all. The joy was somewhat tempered with a little bit of sadness though as the first person who I thought about when the last out was made was my grandfather Donald Dwyer, a life long baseball fan, and a die-hard Giants fan once the team moved to San Francisco from New York. Grandpa died in 2000 and never got a chance to see the Giants win a World Series in San Francisco (he did, however, see two World Series losses.) After I attended the victory parade in 2010, I stopped by my parents' house and visited with my mom who said she was thinking of buying some kind of memento and bringing it up to Holy Cross to leave at my grandparents' grave. I told her I was thinking of the same thing, and I'm sure several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins were thinking it also. I don't know that anyone ever did though.* I'm quite sure there are many Cubs fans feeling the same way today, though with an even deeper connection as their drought was nearly twice as long.

*I didn't leave a memento at Grandpa's grave. I did buy a commemorative brick
that is in Seals Plaza at AT&T Park as part of the "Champions Walk."

I also feel empathy for the Cleveland Indians fans who have now taken over the mantle of longest drought between World Series wins from the Cubs -- it's now at 68 years. They watched their team fall from a 3-1 series lead, and I know the disappointment weighs heavily. Even after my Giants have won 3 World Series, I still remember the awful feeling after they lost in 2002 and while the bitterness has faded there is still a pang of "what if" that lingers. (The "what if" for 1989 and the Earthquake Series isn't quite as strong as I suspect the Oakland Athletics would have won without the interruption as they were the better team, though I never would have admitted it then.)

Between connecting with how the fans of both teams are feeling now, I've also been thinking about how amazing it is that the sport of baseball can connect generations for so long. Much of the news coverage of the 2016 World Series was focused on three dates, 1948, 1945, and 1908. 1948 was the last year the Cleveland Indians won the World Series, 1945 was the last year the Chicago Cubs had appeared in the World Series, and 1908 was the last year the Cubs won the whole thing. Those Cubs dates are particularly mind-boggling to me. As a result, there were lots of stories about what life was like in those years, who was president, what famous people were alive, and so on and so forth. Thinking about things in history books wasn't what made me connect with how long it really had been. It wasn't until I started thinking about my own family history that the sense of time truly hit. Working backwards in time, these are the things that really hit me.
The Cleveland Indians last won the World Series on October 11, 1948. This was a full nine days before my aunt Diane Murray Earnshaw was born. Diane died in 2005 at a too young 57, yet the Indians did not win a World Series in that time. My mother's youngest sister would be born two months after the end of the 1948 World Series; my father's youngest sister wouldn't be born for another four and a half years. My great-grandfather Marshall Edward Murray passed away in May 1948, but I still had three living great-grandparents when the World Series ended, including my great-grandmother Maggie Muckle Kenny who would live 19 more years.

The Chicago Cubs lost the 1945 World Series which ended on October 10, 1945. My father would have just started kindergarten and my mother was a little over a month shy of three years old. The older of my mother's two younger sisters is only three months old, her younger brother hasn't been born yet. My father's younger brother Jackie was still living, his next youngest brother had yet to be born. That so many people I've known my entire life had yet to be born in 1945 and 1948 is amazing.

The date that gets me the most though is October 14, 1908 -- the date of the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. I look back at that date and know that none of my grandparents have been born -- it would be a good 18 months until Grandpa would be born. He lived for 90 years and not once in his long life did the Cubs win the World Series. In 1908, my great-grandmother Mary Mullane is still married to her first husband, Edward Hayes. My Coleman great-grandparents have only been married for 4 years (equaling how long Lizzie has been in the United States); my Dwyer great-grandparents have been married just 3 years. The fact that boggles my mind the most though is that at least 6 of my 16 great-great-grandparents are still living, and possibly 9 of 16 (still figuring out the Coleman/O'Leary side on those.) My great-great-grandmother Elizabeth McDevitt Kenny died a few weeks after the end of the World Series, and my great-great-grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray had been dead less than a year.  My great-great-grandparents were all born between about 1823 and 1855, before the U.S. Civil War, yet six of them were still alive in 1908!

Those are just some of the things that happened in my family during those years, and those kinds of occurrences happened in the families who grew up in and around Chicago and Cleveland. I know how much I thought about Grandpa after the Giants won in 2010 (and again in 2012 and 2014.) I am certain Cubs fans are thinking similar thoughts and looking back at all the people in their family who waited for this moment but never got a chance to see it. I am also certain Indians fans are doing the same thing and wondering when it will be their turn to celebrate.

Baseball has an amazing place in American history. With the founding of the National League in 1876, we have 140 years of people following teams from their cities in what has now become Major League baseball. And while some teams have come, gone, and/or changed cities and names, others have been added so that there are now 30 teams across the country for fans to support and hand down their love for sport from generation to generation. It is sharing family traditions, like cheering for a particular sports team, that strengthens and enriches family ties. Even if a person never met any of her great-great grandparents, she can know there are stories of when that ancestor was going to the baseball stadium to cheer on the same team years before. (And heck, if that person is a fan of the Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox, they've even gone to the same stadium!)
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One last thought -- it's a story I always include when I talk about Grandpa and his love of baseball. When he was growing up in San Francisco, Major League Baseball had yet to come west of the Mississippi, so he was a die hard San Francisco Seals fan. One of the highlights in the history of the Seals was a young player from the heavily Italian North Beach section of town, a fellow named Joe DiMaggio who in 1933 had 61-game hitting streak. Occurring during the Great Depression, Grandpa got to witness a lot of that history. (I also include the story my uncle tells in that linked blog post as I was there when it happened, though not quite in the way described.) Wonder what ever happened to that DiMaggio fellow.

Holiday Traditions

Merry Christmas! I'm taking a brief break from the blog for the holidays, but there are new posts scheduled for the new year. But as Christmas is upon us, I thought I'd take a minute to reflect and remember the Christmas traditions over the years.

When my brother and I were kids in the 1970s and 1980s, Christmas was a pretty set schedule. Christmas Eve would be spent with the Dwyer family at Grandma and Grandpa's. Christmas morning was just for the four of us (or maybe five if we're talking about the early 70s when Dad's youngest sister lived with us) and Christmas dinner was with the Murray side of the family, usually at our house.

We started going to Grandma & Grandpa's on Christmas Eve about 1973 (if my recollection of family photos and home movies is correct.) By that time, there were 10 of us grandchildren of Don and Audley Dwyer -- the 5 Caseys, 2 Murrays, 2 Dwyer sisters, 1 Murphy. We kids were all sent downstairs to the big family room in the garage. It had once been the bedroom for my mother's two brothers, but changed over once they had moved out of the family home. The rules were simple -- no one was allowed upstairs until after dinner and presents. The lone exception to this rule was my oldest cousin Mark who would have been 13 when these parties started. The next closest kid was the oldest of his three younger sisters who was 9. I was his closest cousin at age 5. My 3 year old brother was his closest male relative. Yeah, pretty obvious why the 13 year old got to go upstairs with the grown ups. Now, we kids weren't left alone totally unsupervised -- especially in those early years -- the adults would rotate turns coming down and keeping an eye on us all. We did a pretty good job of keeping ourselves entertained since there were so many of us so close in age. I spent most of my time in those years with one of my Casey cousins who is only 10 months older than me. The Dwyer sisters were always so quiet and sat off to themselves that it wasn't until late in high school that I ever spent much time with them.

For the first few years, all of us got presents from every family. Since my mom was one of six kids, that meant five gifts plus one from Grandma and Grandpa.  We now call those years the "greed fests" because, as you can imagine, a bunch of kids opening six presents each was a bit chaotic. Mark, being the oldest, would hand out the gifts to us younger kids. The funniest part of this, is that every year we all pretty much sat in the same spots. The boys on the floor at Mark's feet, the Dwyer sisters sharing the overstuffed chair, me and the Casey girls on the couch. The gifts had to be handed out in a particular order -- since there were so many of us close in age it was pretty common for everyone to get a variation on the same gift. After a while, there got to be too many of us to do gifts for everyone reasonably, so we drew names and everyone got two gifts. One from the person who drew their name, one from Grandma and Grandpa (the latter tended to be checks as we got older.)

Before driving home from Grandma and Grandpa's, my brother and I often had to change in to our pajamas (at least while we were under 10 or so) and we'd drive home we would pass a Doggie Diner that was at the corner of Junipero Serra Blvd. and 19th Ave. and I would always be sad to see there were one or two people sitting in there on Christmas Eve. It made me appreciate at a very young age having a large, loving family to spend the holidays with.

Christmas morning in the 1970s was also very familiar year in and year out. My brother and I would get up early to see what Santa had left and wake up Mom and Dad pretty much like any other kids. Mom would heat up some eggnog or hot chocolate once we'd torn through all the presents. Usually about a half hour after we'd opened presents there would be a knock on the door -- my brother's two friends from across the street were on the doorstep to see what we'd gotten for Christmas. We moved away from that neighborhood in 1979, but even today if there's a knock on the door on Christmas morning we say "Oh it must be K and J!"

After opening the presents and running outside to play with our friends, the Murray clan would descend upon the house for more food and presents and family time. There were only six of us cousins until the late 1980s, so we weren't banished to the garage like with the Dwyer family, but we usually were in either my or my brother's bedrooms for the most part while the grown ups socialized in the living room. We began rotating houses some time in the 1980s, so Christmas dinner wasn't always at my parents' house, but it was usually spent the same way -- kids off doing something in one part of the house, adults in another.

As we got older, the traditions changed a bit. By the mid 1980s, there were 18 grandchildren on the Dwyer side, most of whom were in high school or older, so everyone ate and opened presents upstairs. The younger cousins still all went downstairs to run around and play, but we all ate and opened presents together. We continued the tradition as we all got older and my cousins started getting married and having families of their own. Getting together on Christmas Eve finally ended when my grandfather passed away in 2000.  Since then, we've had the Dwyer Family Christmas on the Sunday before Christmas -- usually at either my parents' house or at Mom's older brother's house. We stopped drawing names for gifts a few years ago too -- now just the youngest generation gets gifts generally from the grand-aunts and uncles.

Christmas dinner with the Murray family is largely unchanged, though the rotation of houses now includes those of my cousins. It's a tight squeeze with all of us most of the time, but we always make it work.

Christmas Eve is now just my immediate family. My brother, sister-in-law, and I go over to Mom and Dad's for dinner and then head to Mass. After Mass, my brother and sister-in-law head home and I go back and spend the night at Mom and Dad's. In recent  years, my dad's younger brother also stays with them, so I'm on the couch while he gets the guest room.  Christmas morning arrives and my brother and sister-in-law return for breakfast and presents before heading off to see her family. Mom and I play a round of Scrabble -- she usually wins -- and we get ready for the Murray family gathering. This year it will be at Mom and Dad's (hosted by me and my brother and sister-in-law who don't have big enough homes for the whole family) so we'll be a little busier cleaning and setting up for the family to arrive.

This is always my favorite time of the year because I am reminded just how fortunate I am to have such a large, close-knit, and loving family. My cousins are some of my closest friends and spending time with them and the rest of my family is always the best Christmas present I can imagine.