I have always loved Thanksgiving. I love that it is a holiday built around a full table and homemade treats. I love the recipes handed down on index cards that only get made once a year and traditions that bring back childhood memories and the chance to use linen napkins and the idea that sitting around a table -- just sitting around a table -- is reason enough to celebrate.

I think it might be my favorite holiday. I like that expectations are reasonably low and yet the holiday provides an opportunity for people who care about one another to get together.

Of course, things are different this year.

I’m told my extended family will have a “Zoom Thanksgiving,” and I’m trying to be more excited about that than I am. Thanksgiving will be, by necessity, a significantly pared-down affair this year. But I am still looking forward to it. My husband, Peter, and I will celebrate with his sister, Lori, and her husband, Robert. Lori has been fighting cancer all this year and last. We’ll be even more careful than usual so we can share this meal at opposite sides of a room with her. And, yes, we will be grateful.

Because we didn’t know if Lori would be alive to celebrate this holiday. But she will be there, eating turkey and breaking her dietary restrictions to have a piece of pie and a glass of wine, and I know there will be laughter and someone (probably Lori) will tell at least one rude joke and all of us, at our little gathering of four, will be more than usually grateful.

Cancer has been held at bay for another year. Yes, there have been deaths and losses, but there has also been a lot of laughter and some learning in this difficult year and (while it sounds cliché) a new appreciation for how important our relationships are.

My friend Marisa recently had a dream so powerful she felt compelled to share it on Facebook. She dreamed she had died and come back to life and was trying to tell everyone how special and amazing this was, how amazing life was, and no one would listen.

“Maybe you'll listen,” she wrote.

“Times are really rough, I know,” she continued, “and more so for some of us than for others. But this life is a gift full of little gifts. I hope you find some of them in your day today.”

Another friend told me he was suspicious of people like Marisa who were always looking for something to be happy about. If you had to “work to be happy,” it wasn’t “natural,” he said. He may be right.

But just as we’re able to extend Lori’s life or replace a broken hip or clean our teeth -- working at gratitude makes life a lot more pleasant, a lot more bearable, a lot more fun. If that’s unnatural, I’m in favor.

This Thanksgiving, Peter will make the stuffing his grandmother always made. I will make at least two kinds of pie, rolling pastry the way my mother taught me. Lori will get out her family china and silver -- although we won’t be using many place settings this year. Robert will set the table because he’s gotten good at that in these months of Lori’s illness, and Lori will probably ask us, as she has at Thanksgiving gatherings in the past, to share something we are thankful for.

And, in spite of everything, I don’t think any of us will have to work too hard to come up with something to say.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

“I’m going to bake bread!” my husband, Peter, announced.

Inwardly, I said, “Oh, no.”

Baking bread is not easy -- until it is. Every person I know who bakes bread will agree. If there’s someone out there who tried baking bread for the first time and it was a great success, I would like to hear about it because, in my experience, you have to bake a lot of bad bread before you bake anything close to edible. I was afraid Peter was about to find this out.

But what I said was, “Great, honey!”

A lot of people are trying to bake bread these days. Our store is still low on yeast and was out of flour for weeks. I wonder how many bags of flour and bottles of yeast are sitting around unused after a first, disastrous attempt. I remember when I first decided to bake bread.

“I’m going to bake bread!” I announced. There was no one around to discourage me.

I don’t know how many loaves of terrible bread I baked. I lost count. I tried all sorts of recipes. I blamed the altitude and the flour and the yeast. Nothing worked. I kept producing these heavy, unappetizing loaves and the only thing that prevented me from giving them to the birds was my landlord, a portly man, who came by to chat almost every day. He would eat absolutely anything with enough butter and honey on it.

So, my landlord ate loaf after loaf of terrible bread until one day I tried the “No-Knead Bread,” which my brother-in-law recommended and, quite unexpectedly, I made edible bread for the first time.

This was more than 10 years ago and, since that time, I have not experimented with another kind of bread. I will put nuts and raisins and cranberries and wheat bran in my bread on occasion, but the basic recipe remains the same because I figure I am lucky to have found one kind of bread I can manage.

Peter was inspired to bake bread because he remembered the bread his mother made when he was a child. The recipe was on a 3-by-5 index card she’d labeled, “My Good Bread.”

“Did she have bad bread?” I asked Peter.

“No. This is the only bread she made.”

I never met Peter’s mother. She died before Peter and I met. But other than giving birth to Peter, I’ve no reason to believe she had any superhuman abilities. I’m guessing she learned to bake bread like everyone else -- she failed until she found something that worked for her. That’s why she called it “My Good Bread,” to differentiate it from the countless loaves of terrible bread that proceeded it.

And it was obvious she wrote the recipe for herself. There was no oven temperature given, no baking time, and the ingredients were arcane. I’ve never seen “cake yeast” in the store and I’d have to guess that “potato water” was water she had boiled potatoes in. She used a type of graham flour that, as far as Peter can determine, is no longer made. Still, Peter was optimistic.

A few hours later, the results were in.

“My bread is a failure!” Peter announced.

The bread was tasty enough, but it crumbled as soon as it was cut.

“Well,” I said, “you’ll just have to try again!” And I suspect Peter will.

Because there is a reason we bake bread.

It is frustrating and time-consuming and failure-prone. But, really, there is nothing in the world like a loaf of freshly baked bread.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

I am a celebrity among the neighborhood dogs.

By now, I have been giving out dog treats on my daily walk for several months. If you think this has gone unnoticed among my town’s dog population, you would be very much mistaken. If Gwyneth Paltrow or Brad Pitt were to walk down the street, I am quite certain the dogs in my town would be completely unimpressed. Their owners might behave foolishly and start jumping up and down and salivating, but for the dogs, it would be a non-event.

With me, it’s another story.

There is an old black lab I see occasionally on my hike. She is always glad to see me, and her owner and I exchange pleasantries. But then several weeks will go by before I see her again. I saw them not too long ago.

“I have to tell you what you have done to my dog,” the woman said.

Oh no, I thought.

“You walk by our house on your hike every day.”

I have no idea where this woman lives, but I walk a few blocks along the sidewalk before I pick up the trail, so I figure she must live on that stretch of road.

“Every day she sees you walk by, she goes crazy. She barks and jumps up and down in front of the picture window when you pass.”

I had no idea.

There is another dog I see named Cinder. Cinder is very small and sometimes small dogs can have a little attitude. But Cinder’s diminutive frame consists of nothing but love and fur. When she sees me, she appears to lose her tiny mind.

“Cinder!” I yell (not making things easier for her owners). Cinder throws herself on the ground in front of me, belly in the air, tail wagging frantically. I imagine this happens to Brad Pitt with his fans all the time, but it is new to me.

Another time, I saw a dog off-leash, many yards in the distance. The dog saw me and came running -- barreling toward me -- then stopped at my feet and stared at me. I did not recognize her. I could not remember ever seeing her before.

“Where is your owner?” I inquired.

“Who cares?” she replied. She kept staring at me adoringly until I gave her a treat. Eventually, her owner arrived.

“She said you wouldn’t mind if she had a treat,” I told him.

“She’s right,” he told me.

The same thing happened with a pair of dogs I had only seen once, a long time earlier. “You’re like the ice cream truck,” their owner said. “They hear your hiking poles in the distance and come running!”

I’m betting Gwyneth Paltrow has never been compared to an ice cream truck. I was deeply flattered.

Just like the ice cream truck driver, I know how many treats I’ll need on my route. Seven dogs is a good day. Two is a little disappointing. Four to five dogs is about average. Occasionally, I give out half treats if the dog is the size of Cinder and it looks as if a treat would comprise a full meal.

When I get home, my husband, Peter, always asks me, “How was your hike?”

I could tell him about the beautiful blue bird I saw, or how the sun made the pine needles shimmer, or that my legs ached by the time I climbed the final hill. But Peter doesn’t care about any of that.

“It was a good hike,” I tell him. And then I tell him all about my fans.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION