Food, Family, and Football

Thanksgiving has different meanings to many different people.

For me, it meant cool, autumn days spent in the quiet of my grandparents’ home on the North Hill of Prague, Oklahoma. Their little acreage was nestled between farmland and open pastures of quiet cattle grazing or basking in the sun. Grandma and Grandpa would have harvested a lot of vegetables from their large garden by now, and the leaves would gleam vibrant reds, glowing golds, and warm oranges.

After a busy morning of cooking in the kitchen, the house would quickly fill up with family from all over the area bringing their own dishes to set up for the feast. Over a delicious lunch made up of family recipes and traditions, the family would catch up; who moved where, who got a new job doing what, who just got married, who just had a kid (and pictures of said kid), who was just starting school where, etc.

All of these people from all over the country were brought together for one meal. And in that meal, they would bring their traditions and successes. They would bring Great Aunt’s sweet potato recipe, or make Great Great Grandma’s stuffing recipe. You couldn’t divert from Auntie’s carrots recipe, it just wouldn’t taste the same. In one meal, the past and present collided in a beautiful celebration of life and family.

A couple of years ago, Thanksgiving also took on a new meaning for me.

My husband, Court, and I brought wild turkey breast up for our small gathering during Thanksgiving of 2020. We had carefully smoked the day before, then brought it up in a cooler so that my family could experience wild turkey for the first time.

When we served it up on the big day, I couldn’t help the joy and pride that I felt as we all quickly devoured the turkey (kudos to my husband, he really outdid himself!). I remembered, maybe a week before, harvesting those turkeys with Court. They had wandered into a feeder where we were deer hunting, and in Texas, it was still rifle season for fall turkeys.

These turkeys would affectionately become known as the Matrix turkeys, but that’s a story for another time!

Since then, we have served up our harvests for other friends and family, too. We’ve made baked Redfish on the half shell, grilled venison backstrap, smoked trout, smoked venison roasts, grilled steaks, dove/duck jalapeno poppers, redfish throat poppers, and probably more that I can’t even remember.

And each time we get to share these meals with people we care about, it feels like Thanksgiving all over again. People gathering over a meal that we made, field to table.

What I love about the outdoors industry is that this is a huge part of the culture. When you are blessed with such abundance, it’s hard not to want to share it.

It’s a beautiful thing to me that somewhere deep in our nature, next to the primitive desire and need to hunt our food, is also the desire to share and care for each other.

This year, I’ll wake up on Thanksgiving morning in the sleepy college town of Lawrence, Kansas. Our gathering will be smaller, but still full of love and food. We’ll start the cooking early in the morning, all of us chopping or stirring with one hand and gratefully sipping coffee from the other.

There will be venison on the menu from Texas, and plenty of traditional recipes from Oklahoma and Virginia. There will be football on tv until the Rockettes perform, and then serious discussions about the college football playoffs. And over an enormous holiday lunch, we’ll exchange smiles and catch up on everything that’s happened in the last year.

Some things change, but Thanksgiving will always be the same in my heart; food, family, and football.