Thanksgiving makes us grateful for calendar

Forever on Thanksgiving Day

The heart will find the pathway home.

-- Wilbur D. Nesbit

Thanksgiving's coming up, and I'm getting out the schedule books, the calendar and last year's diaries.

I have to.

You see, I have to make sure which table I'll be sitting at Thursday a week from now.

That's the way the family holidays are anymore -- we have to figure out which relative and which set of parents/grandparents get the annual visits.

We have to be fair. We have to share. And I can never seem to remember where we were last year.

Thanksgiving is important because where we go then is predicated on where we will go Christmas.

And where we go Christmas depends on where we went last Christmas.

I know it's this way at your house, too.

It's kind of like your favorite college football team making out the home-and-away schedule, while factoring in nonconference opponents.

As best I can figure it all started many, many years ago when my son was born. Both grandparents hinted they wouldn't mind hosting his "first Christmas."

Showing my usual man-of-the-house assertiveness, I told my wife it would be fine if her mother got our son's inaugural Noel.

That meant we had to go to see my parents for Thanksgiving.

The home-and-away holidays schedule was thus established, and, for all I know, engraved somewhere in stone.

Even years -- her family gets Christmas and mine gets Thanksgiving.

Odd years -- my family gets Christmas and hers gets Thanksgiving.

But it doesn't stop there. We have siblings.

They also make their schedules based on the even-year; odd-year rotations that we carefully established in the previous millennium.

If the parents/grandparents aren't with us, they'll be with someone else.

And, of course, sibling spouses have parents and grandchildren, too, and those factors entered the big holiday equation.

Today it all equals a complex web of interstate day trips and occasional plane flights all for about 45 precious minutes around a crowded table eating and talking to people with whom I share turkey, cranberries and some resemblance.

We celebrate the tradition the way we schedule it -- thankfully.

Reach Bill Kirby at (706) 823-3344 or bill.kirby@augustachronicle.com.