CULTURE SHOCK

Thanksgiving at Home

Where delicious dressing and great stories originate

Ihave travel and Thanksgiving food on my mind. I probably need one more coffee to try to make sense of this column, but what I want to say is that the best part of traveling is coming home. The holidays involve going home for a lot of people. It’s funny how many Southerners have two homes. Home is where you live, but it’s also where your people live. When I was growing up, both sets of my grandparents lived in Alexander City, so we never had to travel anywhere. Family came to us.

The late celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain once said, “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

I write a lot about traveling because all the good stories are in the car, on the horse, in the boat or in the air. Travel is just going from point A to point B.

I am happy to report that I finally shook the dust off my red Samsonite last month and conquered the Atlanta airport for the first time since the pandemic. I flew to Baltimore and attended the birthday dinner of a friend in Washington, D.C. It was a fast 48hour trip with no turbulence.

I used to hop on a plane every week for work in my 20s and lived out of hotels. I do not miss that. I barely made it to Atlanta on time, and now that I am in my 30s, I realize I have changed. I increasingly love small towns (everywhere), and I hate traffic.

I realize why everyone wants to move to our Lake Martin area. As a realtor, it’s an easy sell. Wide open

spaces and clear starry skies where the most stress you will experience on the road is when you get behind a dump truck on State route 63. All that to say, as I look through cookbooks for new Thanksgiving dishes to Culture try, I feel fortunate that I will travel only 30 minutes this year to Opelika where we will be Shock frying Thanksgiving turkeys at my brother’s place. True to tradition, I’ll make the dressing again (If your dressing is ever too runny, just keep stuffing white bread in it. It will firm up). We will mix bloody Marys and laugh about a wrecked minivan, my grandmother (Ma) putting Koon’s Korner casseroles in her own serving dishes to pass off as her own, and the time I made the collards too spicy to eat at the Howells. The older I get, the more I value the tradition of such things and day drinking red wine with my people. Lacey Howell Hopefully, we’ll get a few new stories out of this year. If you are welcoming tired travelers to your home, go easy on them if they came from the airport. If they show up by car and look ready to kill each other, ask them how many things happened between Birmingham and your driveway. I am sure it’ll be enough to fill a book. Happy holidays, y’all.

~ Lacey Howell is a recovering English major from Auburn who now lives on Lake Martin, sells real estate, rides horses and loves good wine. Follow her on Instagram@LaceyHowell and on her Facebook page.