Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Holidays change, stay the same

I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving. If you’re like me, you did the same things you do every year on this holiday, and with the same people.

As I do every other year, I celebrated Thanksgiving with my mother's side of the family. She has one of those Brady Bunch families: After her mother died, in the early 1960s, her father married a widow with school-aged children.

My mother and her sister were named Bowers, and her three new siblings were named Williams. To this day, they call themselves the Bo-Willies, and they are a generous and tight-knit group.

Over the years, the Bo-Willies have grown from 10 -- the five siblings and their spouses -- to a whopping 73, which includes me and my 13 cousins, our 12 spouses, and our 37 children.

We gather every Thanksgiving at my parents' camp in Alabama. Not everybody shows up every single year. This year we dipped down to 53.

We did the same old things. We stayed in cabins and met at the camp lodge for meals and fellowship. We painted a turkey in the middle of the ballfield, then sprayed orange paint on rolls of toilet paper to mark the end zones, and we played a spirited game of football, the Bo's against the Willies.

After the game, we ate turkey and ham and cornbread dressing and all the other things we usually eat. I'm happy to report that each aunt tried to out-cook the other, and that the food tasted like it always does.

People talked, or walked, or took a nap, and then we gathered by the fire to sing and share some of the interesting things that have happened in our lives during the past year.

But I noticed something new: We've incorporated electronic devices into our lives. Even the older adults will step away from a conversation to check their cellphones.

It hasn't hurt anything, though.

When my uncle was playing "Puff the Magic Dragon" on his guitar for the children and forgot the lyrics, somebody just looked them up on a smartphone.

When a conversation about Ferguson, Mo., turned uncomfortable, somebody read aloud a viral Facebook post from Ben Watson, the former University of Georgia and current New Orleans Saints tight end. That was the last word.

Mostly, we just caught up on things. I was talking to an aunt and remembered the time when I was 15 years old and the Bo-Willies were spending a week at Fripp Island, S.C. My parents were unable to go, so my mother took me to Atlanta to meet my grandmother, who'd driven down from Lookout Mountain, so I could ride with her.

I'd gotten my learner's permit weeks earlier. We were in the parking lot of the old Shannon Mall, and I put my suitcase in the trunk of my grandmother's car and slammed it shut. Then I headed toward the passenger's side.

"No sir," my grandmother said. Then she tossed me the keys.

I drove through morning rush hour traffic in Atlanta, and then got us all the way to the Atlantic Coast. That day, I was the kind of driver my grandmother believed I could be. She had that effect on all of us.

To me, that's what the holidays are all about. Sure, they're about eating and relaxing and giving and getting, but they're also about remembering the remarkable people who got us here in the first place.

Contact Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, at dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published November 28, 2014 at 6:17 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Holidays change, stay the same."