On Thanksgiving, we’re encouraged to take the day out to be thankful for our many blessings. We here at Silverline are thankful most of all for YOU, who continue to support us and read our comics…and that allows us to continue to make comics, which we love doing.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we asked Silverline Creators: What’s your favorite Thanksgiving memory (childhood or otherwise)?

-Barb Kaalberg
I grew up on a farm in Iowa a half mile from my Grandparents, a stereotypical old farmer couple with bib overalls for my Grandfather and a dress with an apron for my Grandmother. For Thanksgiving, my Aunt and Uncle and my 3 cousins would join my Dad, Mom and us three kids on my Grandparents farm for the usual huge meal. My Grandmother would make every single person their favorite dish and their favorite dessert in addition to the expected Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy and homemade, yeast raised dinner rolls. Everything, of course, was made from scratch. There were so many dishes of different kinds of food and desserts that she could have fed half of a small country, but she cherished making everyone happy with her (amazing, drooling good, from scratch, homemade) cooking that she relished making everyone’s favorites. Desserts would include pies, cakes, cookies, jam filled kolaches and homemade cinnamon buns. An awful lot of food for 12 people! But it was all made with love, and that was the best thing of all.

-Thomas Florimonte
My Grandmother’s turkey “Dressing.” Not that nasty “Stuffing” stuff that northerns pass off as a “side dish” during the Thanksgiving meal. I’m talking about good ‘ol Southern Cornbread Turkey Dressing. In most cases, it’s not a side dish to the Turkey itself. It’s a “Main Dish” served along side, right next to the turkey. In “my” house, if you don’t serve “Dressing” during the Thanksgiving meal, then you might as well not serve a turkey at all. And my Grandmother made the best dressing in the world- Fight me.

-Mike W. Belcher
Best Thanksgiving was probably the one time that both sets of my grandparents came to our house for the holiday. Until then, everything was very separate with my family going to one or the other every year. Having everyone together for once was nice and one of the few times I enjoyed Thanksgiving. Can’t say it’s one of my favorite holidays for whatever reason.

-Sid VenBlu
I only have one Thanksgiving memory because I’ve celebrated it just once. That’s a holiday only in the United States after all.
Sean Wolfe invited my close friend Sarah and I to have dinner together at his house, there I not only got awesome food, but also I got to meet the man behind “Cooking with Stupid.” It was a very pleasant evening all in all.

-Rob Davis
My father attempting to pull off turkey and stuffing ( which at our house were prepared separately) one Thanksgiving when my mother was in the hospital. He nearly pulled it off, but he came close to burning the stuffing. It was pretty dry and needed a lot of gravy to be edible. Seeing my WWII era dad a bit out of his depth but soldiering through was priceless.

-Ron Fortier
Okay, I’ve lots of them but they are all jumbled together.
My mother was one of ten children so Thanksgiving were pretty much us celebrating at home. On those rare occasions when she and her sisters decided to do it up big, we’d all go to my grandparents home in Maine. Now consider, my grandfather and grandfather, their ten children and their spouses…and all their kids. Honestly I had more cousins than the populations of small towns. Mom and my aunts would do all the cooking, each of the five ladies bringing individual dishes like some giant pot-luck gathering. Dad and his brother-in-laws would take out the extra tables and chairs from the attack and set them up through the living room and kitchen area. There was one giant table for the grown-ups and at least three smaller round tables for us munchkins.
I remember mounds of food, deserts and then when all had eaten their fill, we kids were cut loose to go out in the huge backyard to play games. Growing up in a big family is an amazing blessing and though the elders for the most part are all gone now, the memories of those gatherings keep me warm as I move on in this journey.

-Jaxon Renick
The Thanksgiving that comes to mind is the one when I was in art school, away from home and my buddy opened up the pizza shop he worked at for all of his friends and co-workers to have a Thanksgiving Dinner and not be alone. That was some damn fine pizza!

-John Metych
We used to go to my grandmother’s each Thanksgiving. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would all be there. The dining room table was large and accommodated seating all the adults. My cousins and I, however, got to sit at “the kiddie table.”
That wasn’t a bad thing, as it was an exclusive table for our generation. We would talk and act goofy, common for our age.  The table was always placed against a small wall separating the dining room from the kitchen.
My grandparent’s house was older – built in 1921 – and had age appropriate wear. During one Thanksgiving, we took note of a small crack in the wall. As kids are goofy and do silly things, one of my cousins used a spoonful of the instant mashed potatoes from their plate as spackle! They filled the crack with rehydrated potato flakes… surprisingly, the colour was a fairly close match!
We cousins still laugh about that impromptu Thanksgiving “MacGyvered This Old House” style repair!

-Brad Thomte
When I was young, my family would have the traditional Thanksgiving meal each year.  It was my mother, father, my younger brother, and me.
One of the items on the menu was cranberry sauce.  It wasn’t homemade, it was canned.  This was in the 70’s and 80’s and the cans had an embossed expiration date on the bottom instead of an inked stamp.
This caused an imprint of the date to transfer to the gelatinous blob
that was the cranberry sauce.
This phenomenon created a rivalry between my brother and I.  We
constantly fought as to who “gets the numbers.”  It got so bad that we
had to keep track of who got the numbers the year before.
Unfortunately, the last few years we were at home together, the cans
had switched over to the inked stamp instead of the embossing, so we
were unable to continue the rivalry.

-Peter Clinton
As I spent the last 3 years studying in the US I did get to participate in 3 thanksgivings. Usually those of us staying in student accommodation and near by would gather to have a ‘Friendsgiving’ where we’d all bring food and drink and have a bit of a party.
And one year my class mate Jose invited me to spend Thanksgiving with him and his family out in Pennsylvania, where his wife made a hell of a lot of food and I made sure to confuse his kids with a great many lies about life in the UK. Yes, we all live in castles!
We ended the evening with their family tradition where they all sit down and watch White Christmas, which I’m embarrassed to say I had never seen!

-Kevin Gallegly
I do t have a single one… just the ceremony around it… the good dishes… candles… the spread of snacks and finger foods… a college football game on because my grandfather was a big USC fan!

-Scott Wakefield
This is a tough question, because I have a large family and we love being together. Childhood Thanksgivings have been in New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and places I’m sure I’ve forgotten. Our gatherings are always noisy and full of laughter, often requiring the ability to maintain multiple conversations at once.
One of my favorite Thanksgivings was at my aunt & uncle’s house in Indiana. I think I was 12 or 13 years old. They had a big house, with a big finished basement and tons of Nerf guns. My cousins, my brother, and I played almost non-stop, running, jumping over furniture, laughing and yelling and being sweaty adolescent lunatics. They also had a new computer with games I had never seen before, and I wanted to stay up all night playing. To make it even better, my grandparents lived nearby, so we were all able to spend time together. I think the meal was good, but then, I’ve never had a bad Thanksgiving dinner.
Family is a big part of my life, and I’m glad to have trouble finding one happy memory.

-Rory Boyle
Being from the great state of Ohio, we’re guaranteed to be graced with a healthy dose of lake effect snow. It shows up and accumulates in a hurry. Every Thanksgiving my family would pack up some classic dishes and make the drive along the coast of Lake Erie to my Aunt & Uncle’s house for our annual feast. Usually by then feet of snow had fallen. My Aunt and Uncle’s house was tucked away down long winding roads not frequently trafficked, leaving the roads paved with fresh white powder. The trees, being either blasted and caked with snow or standing tall and silent, their limbs would frosted with snow looking like skeletal fingers reaching over the road. We’d reach their driveway in our station wagon and turn onto the snow covered gravel. Pulling up to the party of cars, and rushing out to meet family, we were always greeted by the aroma of a turkey roasting on a spit, and the joyful shouts of welcome from the rest of the family. It was a beautiful start to every winter season.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Silverline to all of you!
#MakeMineSilverline!

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