A Day for Giving Thanks

The Official  Maycock Family Thanksgiving Portrait, November 25, 2012

For awhile now Thanksgiving has been less about the specific day and more about the people we share the time with.

For the first two years after we moved back to the States from Saipan, we celebrated Thanksgiving with the Paez tribe on the fourth Friday in November, rather than on Thursday because our flight arrived in Portland on Thanksgiving day. Last year we enjoyed two celebrations, a quiet one here at home with Barbara's parents, and then our traditional celebration with the Paez family the week after Christmas in Oregon.

The Paez family mourns our absence at Thanksgiving this year.  Carol sent me  this photo on Thanksgiving day with the caption "Thanksgiving without the Maycocks."  We missed them too.  Next year! (In the mean time we're grateful to have Carol, at least coming to spend a few days with us the week after Thanksgiving)

This year we didn't even bother to make any concrete Thanksgiving plan.  There was no long menu of foods to cook, no guest list to plan, no flights to catch or drives to make.  As in previous years our approach to Thanksgiving had everything to do with the people--or in this case the person--we shared the day with rather than the day of the holiday and the food we ate.

Thanksgiving day 2012 began at the hospital and ended here at home.  The menu was supposed to be chicken pot pie but it turns out I didn't have any shortening so we scrounged together some left overs instead.  But none of that mattered.  What mattered was the person for whom we gladly turned our holiday plans upside down, our newborn son, Ezra.  He was born just two days before Thanksgiving and in his arrival we have much to give thanks for.

Next year, I don't know where, when, or how we'll celebrate Thanksgiving.  But one thing I know for sure:  It will be the people, including a special one-year old, who will make the day special.

A friend of mine recently announced on Facebook that her daughter had been wishing folks a "Happy Birth Giving" and while for most it might have been a cute misstatement, for us it was a very apt description of a our experience, a happy birth giving indeed!  Thanks to the epidural, Ezra's entrance into the world was virtually pain free from start to finish.

A new day, a new chapter in our life.  Sunrise on the first full day of Ezra's life.  I took this photo from Barbara's hospital room, early Wednesday morning, November 21 , the day before Thanksgiving.

The Feller meets his little brother for the first time.

With the grandparents

Ezra Maycock, the focus of this year's Thanksgiving celebration.