There were hard Thanksgivings pre-pandemic. Uncle Wally’s Cold Duck always helped

During the Eisenhower era, we were focused on the Communist menace and duck-and-cover drills, not food safety. Mother fixed the Thanksgiving turkey the night before by stuffing the warm dressing in the cold bird and sewing it up.

Happily, no one got salmonella, and no one dropped the A-bomb.

During the Reagan era we had a family of our own, and we lived on ten wooded acres in Northern Minnesota. Reagan’s trickle-down economic policies hadn’t quite trickled down to us. Thanksgiving would be a potluck with the extended family contributing.

When a foot of snow fell Thanksgiving morning, the extended family couldn’t get over the river and through the woods with all the food. We found ourselves with 22-pound turkey and nothing else to eat.

Worse, Uncle Wally couldn’t come with the Cold Duck. It was a somber one-dish holiday.

During the first Bush era we moved from the woods back to the city. The blue stucco house with cheap wood paneling was all we could afford. Despite its non-McMansion status, the house did have a regular oven and a smaller one over the stove.

We put the newly stuffed turkey into the oven, set the temperature and went to watch the Macy’s parade. When we checked on it two hours later, the oven was still cold. No amount of cajoling and pleading could get it to heat.

If this had been the Obama era of hope, we might have taken the raw turkey door-to-door in the new neighborhood to find a friendly oven. But it was the era of Desert Storm, and we didn’t know who among our neighbors might be armed.

Fortunately, the little oven heated. We stuffed the turkey in and crossed our fingers. The food safety experts would have been appalled. It added another two hours onto the cooking time, which gave the family more time to bump into each other in the small house.

The turkey roasted, no one suffered from salmonella and the extended family had a fine time thanks to Uncle Wally’s Cold Duck.

During the Clinton era in better economic times, we moved to a bigger house and invited even more guests for Thanksgiving. A coil on our electric stove overheated, burning through the bottom of a saucepan full of simmering giblets, causing it to explode and spew turkey parts onto the walls and the ceiling.

Thanks to Uncle Wally’s Cold Duck, no one noticed the new organ meat décor in the kitchen. While Congress worked on impeachment, we spent the next few weeks scraping giblets off the ceiling. Perhaps this is why the children grew up to be vegetarians.

During the second Bush era, we sold our home and moved to Washington state to be with our vegetarian children. Thanksgiving had a new flavor—squash and kale. We missed the turkey, so we volunteered to make a small one for the family members who weren’t vegetarian.

We stuffed it and brought it to be roasted at our vegetarian son’s house. Unbeknownst to us, the thermostat on his oven didn’t work. The turkey roasted for several hours and came out flaccid (like the economy) and warm to the touch.

The bird went immediately to the compost. Sadly, because we’d moved away from the extended family, we had none of Uncle Wally’s Cold Duck to salute its demise.

During the Obama era of health care, we accepted that there would be no more turkey, roasted or unroasted. We contributed a vegetarian casserole to the annual gathering. It tasted like Grape Nuts flavored eggplant. It, too, went to the compost.

Now, during the COVID-19 era, we will sit at home with a turkey drumstick or two and enjoy the family through the magic of Zoom.

We know this era will also pass. We’ve learned through the decades that Thanksgiving is not about the bird, it’s about family and friends and memories of snowstorms, turkey parts on the ceiling and Uncle Wally’s Cold Duck.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Linda Norlander is a Tacoma resident and former News Tribune reader columnist (Class of 2017). She’s working on the second novel in her “Cabin by the Lake” mystery series, scheduled for release next May.