Giving thanks

My family is heavy on traditions. Some last for a few years, some a few decades, some for generations. Some are timeless, some suitable only for a specific frame of our lives or a certain reoccurring situation. The only thing that is constant with them is the ongoing struggle to incorporate them into our increasingly busy, ever divergent lives.

My family began the Thanksgiving weekend Waterton camping trips while I was on my mission. In this part of the world, October in the mountains usually mean snow or at least cold and probably a lot of wind. When they sent me the pictures, I found myself asking myself why on earth anyone would want to camp at this time of year. The Thanksgivings of my childhood were warm, celebratory affairs laden with turkey and pumpkin pie in quantities that bordered on obscene. Due to a strange convergence in our family, we usually ended up focusing on the dessert aspect of the holiday. My birthday usually falls within a week of Thanksgiving, so my mother would make a black forest cake to go along with the pumpkin pie. As if that weren't enough, my brother hated pumpkin pie so my mother would bake him an apple pie. My Grandmother, not wanting to be left out, would usually come to Thanksgiving dinner with several pies of her own; usually of the cherry, blueberry, or mincemeat variety. When coupled with the gargantuan turkeys my parents cooked, Thanksgiving Day usually turned into Thanksgiving Week at our house, at least on a culinary level.

After the decadence of years of these overwrought dinners and their whipped-cream topped conclusions, the idea of going camping on Thanksgiving signalled a paradigm shift in my family's mentality. Granted, by this point my Grandparents had passed away and the whole idea of the large extended-family dinner had faded away somewhat. Still, it seemed strange to see photos of my family hiking in a snowstorm when they should have been gorging themselves on pie in front of the fireplace. It was almost unbelievable that they would be off on a camp kitchen eating chips and hotdogs instead of turkey, mashed potatoes, and the usual litany of vegetables & salads. Times had very clearly changed.

It surprised me again when they went camping again the following year, and I began to realize that perhaps the Thanksgiving camping trips were not just a blip on the radar. By the third year, I was home and actually looking forward to seeing what made these late-season excursions so appealing to them. As it turned out, it would completely change the way I thought about Thanksgiving.

The weekend itself was more or less miserable. It was freezing cold and rained the whole time, which is pretty much what I was expecting. I slept in the back of the Suburban with my brother, and it was extremely uncomfortable. By the end of the weekend I was thoroughly exhausted and had caught a cold, but it had surprisingly been a lot of fun. The food had evolved into a respectable albeit somewhat downsized Thanksgiving feast, prepared with the help of the propane stove & oven in the trailer. The cake and pies (only pumpkin this time) had been prepared in advance and were just as good as I remembered them. We spent the weekend walking around town, going for hikes, and riding our bikes. It was the best weekend I could remember having in a long time.

That was 1997. Every year since, we have tried to spend Thanksgiving weekend together as a family in Waterton. When I think about it now, it makes nothing but sense. A holiday devoted to the idea of giving thanks for the good things in your life should be spent in the midst of the most important of those things. Even the location could not be more perfect. With my family's long history in Waterton, there is no other place on earth I would rather be. It's a perfect place to celebrate togetherness.

There have been changes over the years. Sleeping in the Suburban went the way of the dinosaur and we tried our luck with tents. Three years, two wind-shredded tents, and one torrential downpour later, we abandoned the tent idea as well. In later years, once spouses and children entered the picture for some of us, accommodations changed yet again. Some of us brought our own trailers, and some of us stayed at a bed & breakfast in Mountain View where we would still be within a 15 minute drive of the park. Making the weekend work required some flexibility, but we did our best to work things out. We missed one year completely when my mother was sick in the hospital, but rebounded the following year.

The weekend spawned some offshoot traditions of its own. One of the earliest was a family hike, born out of my mother's impressive determination. The very first year they went camping, while I was still in France, my mother grew tired of the grumbling of a certain sibling who was not impressed at being confined to the trailer for the weekend and marched the entire family up the side of a mountain in the middle of a blinding snow storm. The story became a part of family legend, and the hike was repeated every year regardless of weather. In 2000, I invited some friends to join us for the hike and they came up for the day to meet us. One of those friends was a woman who would become my girlfriend a week later and my wife within a year.

The mountain biking also took on a life of its own. My brothers and I started making an effort to go for a ride every year on one of the three trails in the park that are open to mountain biking. The first year we tried Akamina Pass, and ended up riding through a foot of snow trying in vain to stay on the trail. We had so much fun that we decided to make it an annual event. The "Fall Ride" began to be a focus for us, and our numbers grew as friends and roommates would make the trip down, even if only for the day, to join the ride. Our crowing achievement was in 2002, when we rode all three trails in a single day.

In 2003, we added another element to the weekend. I had recently taken up golf and wanted my brothers and my father to come with me. We went to the Waterton golf course and shot a round of nine holes, the last three of which were in the middle of a developing snow storm. (see a pattern here?) We all shot horrible rounds, but we had a great time laughing at each other, and the Turkey Cup was born.

As great as these weekends were, they were not without their problems, and the Thanksgiving weekend tradition almost did itself in on more than one occasion. Bad weather, close quarters, and personal complications almost killed a few trips in very ugly fashion, but we always seemed to be able to work things out. It wasn't until recently that an additional strain began to appear as the weekends began to become victims of their own success. My parents told some people in their ward about our family tradition, and they liked the idea so much that they invited themselves along. Then they told their friends how much fun it had been, and the next year we had half the ward camping alongside us. The weekends began to lose their ambience and took on a life not dissimilar to the chaotic throes of a ward campout. People began pressuring my parents to plan meals together, and trying to coordinate activities that 40 people would enjoy became a headache rather than an enjoyable weekend together. Of course, since my parents had started the trend, it was assumed that they would also spearhead the planning. It seemed to us that people were missing the point completely. Our fun "family" weekend had become a huge overblown production, and finally, exasperated, my parents decided to pull the plug on the whole thing.

Last year, there was no camping trip. We stayed in Lethbridge and broke routine completely. There was no hike, no Fall Ride, and we played the Turkey Cup at a crowded golf course near my parents' home. It felt all wrong. We left feeling like we had missed something; it had been nice to see our families, but the weekend just hadn't been the same. Thanksgiving had lost its lustre.

This year, we're starting over. There may or may not be a Fall Ride, a hike, or a Turkey Cup, but we will be camping in Waterton. If there are other people there, they will be there on their own and won't be part of our group. We're returning to the roots of our tradition; going back to the things that matter. I'm glad that we are resuming the tradition. It is important to me, and it's something I want to pass on to my children as well. There are precious few times during the year that enable you to really stop what you're doing, take a step back, and appreciate what you've got and where you came from, and I'm glad that we aren't going to let that go. Tomorrow night we will back our bags, load the car up way beyond capacity, and head for the hills. I don't know exactly what we'll do all weekend, but I do know two things for sure. We'll have a lot of fun, and it will probably snow.