Thanksgiving is 0ver–the table has been cleared and the dishes washed. Everyone is complaining (bragging?) about being sleepy. I’m willing to back my words up with action and actually doze off. (Oh the extent that we’ll reach to prove our points).
Holidays make me reminisce about how things were done in my youth. The food hasn’t changed much and we are still using my grandmothers trivets. They have been broken, carefully repaired, and kept in circulation.
The biggest changes? In my youth there were three networks and at least two of them were showing football on Thanksgiving. Everyone tended to watch the same game and critique it among themselves.
Today, there are a gazillion channels (give or take), but as soon as one person leaves the table, everybody else immediately grab their smartphones. There is no need to discuss what they are watching because everyone is probably watching something different.
Houses have certainly changed. My parents’ and grandparents’ homes still had a flip up metal door that connected the outside to a room in the basement that had a built-in ramp. That room,was called the coal room and the ramp, a coal chute. Our furnace had been designed as a coal fired furnace but had been converted to natural gas, so we never had the coal truck back up to the house and dump a load of coal down the coal chute.
However, the most Thanksgivingy thing were the stoves. Almost everybody had updated their kitchens, which invariably included a new stove. The old stove was moved to the basement and connected to the gas line. For big family get togethers, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, both stoves were in full operation. Items that took longer, such as the turkey were cooked down in the basement oven while the foods that needed more frequent attention were cooked upstairs.
Things change, though. We had ham instead of turkey (by majority vote) and we used the kitchen stove to cook everything, because we don’t have a backup stove in the basement. This shortfall was caused, at least in part, by the fact that our house does not have a basement.
sfnowak 
Happy Thanksgiving, Steve. My dad always came up with an answer for all of my dumb questions when I was a curious kid. Sometimes I didn’t know if what he said was to shut me up–or had a semblance of fact, truth or wisdom.
Family legend has it that dad was busy helping mom eating the Thanksgiving meal and I have the audacity to ask what Thanksgiving means. Dad looks at me as if he’s going to kill me, but after a mouthful of turkey and mashed potatoes answers me, “Thanks for giving.”
Blessings to you and all your readers. –rick