Our Thanksgiving dinner table looked exactly the same every year in the 1970s and 80s...and the 90s...and the 2000s

 

Full disclosure: I stole the photo above from the folks at Bob Evans, who want you to know they're basically ready to cater your entire Thanksgiving if you'd like.

But in some ways that image isn't too dissimilar from the reality of my Thanksgivings growing up on Harding Drive. We had a lot of the same foods, and every year we would take a picture once they were all cooked and set out on the table.

The thing is, other than maybe some discoloration from the early years before film technology really evolved, you very likely couldn't tell the difference between the 1972 photo and the 1998 photo.

Or between any two years, really. This is because we ate the same stuff year after year, decade after decade.

Don't get me wrong, it was all tasty stuff, but it never varied.

Which was fine by me, though I always thought it was funny that we took pictures of the same table with the same tablecloth and the same platters of Thanksgiving deliciousness, with no regard to the fact that these images ended up being essentially photocopies of one another.

My mom was a great cook, but she also scored points for consistency.

Terry started attending our Thanksgiving dinners as a teenager. She found it strange that we had turkey and ham and roast beef as options, but we never had homemade pies (they were, she recalls, usually store-bought Marie Callender pies).

To be fair, I always thought it was odd that her family had side dishes like rutabaga on their Thanksgiving table, though for the record, I liked that rutabaga. Some years I think my mother-in-law Judy and I were the only two people who ate it.

Anyway, I miss the Thanksgivings of years past, probably because so many of the people who were there are now gone. So it goes.

I still don't think there's anything wrong with having multiple meats on Thanksgiving, though.