fitover50

With Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season upon us, many of us are starting to dust off the family collection of recipes and prepare to cook, bake and assemble those once a year culinary delights that tie us to our family and our childhood. I know I will be enjoying my traditional favorites of turkey, bread stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, a couple of vegetables and, for dessert, a chocolate pie.

What? You say my chocolate pie doesn’t match up with the traditional pumpkin pie you may be used to consuming at the end of your over-stuffed holiday dinner? Maybe not, but that is my tradition. It is my family tradition. Oh, we always had pumpkin pie and, believe it or not, mince meat pie for dessert as well. Those varieties had their followers at my family dinner table. But for me and several others, the holiday dinner always ended with chocolate pie.

Over the years a few traditions have changed. It’s still the turkey for the main course, but new and unique recipes for stuffing, variations on the theme for vegetables and a definite bend towards lower fat, more health conscious options has definitely emerged around the dinner table. For a while I even gravitated away from the chocolate pie.

But, not this year. This year will be dinner with family members of the old regime. The traditions will be the ones I grew up with.

Next year, who knows, maybe lobster tail and king crab legs on the menu for the holidays. That idea has a lot of appeal to me. I like to start new traditions so that, years from now, people will look back on the holidays and remember traditions that I am given credit for initiating.

What traditions do you hold onto? What new tradition would you like to start in your family this year?

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