Lynn Shapiro

My earliest memory of Thanksgiving was at Grandma Gelman’s apartment in Hyde Park. I was just a tot. The smell of garlic and roast turkey coming from her apartment wrapped us in Grandma’s culinary embrace before we’d even climbed the three flights up to her landing. In Grandma’s immigrant world, food was love, its abundance a physical measure of her heart’s boundless capacity.

Grandma’s stoneware serving pieces were the centerpiece of her Thanksgiving extravaganza, a wedding gift in 1916. I loved the exotic pictures of Japanese ladies in kimonos, birds of paradise, and lush gardens that danced across their lids and bowls. Grandma filled one casserole with her butter-drenched bread-crumb stuffing, one with mashed potatoes, and one with green beans or peas. When Grandma gave up her Chicago apartment and moved to Miami Beach, the stoneware set came to our house in suburban Lombard and our Thanksgiving table. When my mother sold her condo on Chicago’s near north side, she gave them to me, where they have held a place of honor on our Thanksgiving table, which always includes Grandma’s delicious bread-crumb stuffing, extra garlicky.

These timeless icons of our family’s Thanksgiving history tie us to the generations that have gathered around our family’s Thanksgiving tables, from Grandma’s apartment, to my childhood home, my parents’ retirement condo, and our family home, where our children, and now our grandchildren, gather around our holiday table, truly emblems of our family’s love.