Are you overwhelmed by thoughts of hosting a huge family gathering on Thanksgiving? Will you consult the November issue of Martha Stewart Living? Forget that! Just listen to me.

I come from Vashon’s most fertile neighborhood, and I’m not talking about soil. Starting with my grandparents, the Therkelsens, and continuing with my parents, the Willsies, plus the Kirklands, Stockamps and Hjortens, those folks at Center were a lusty bunch, with the kids to prove it. And feeding a crowd didn’t faze them. When I was growing up there in the 1950s and ’60s my parents made having a big family look easy.

Want to know how they did it? No, no! I don’t mean THAT! I mean managing the Great American Family Feast. Every November, I saw my mother take a deep breath, draw herself up to her full height of five feet and begin the campaign, brave as General Patton, with Dad at her side. I observed and learned. Here are some of the basic requirements for a proper Thanksgiving:

You will need:

1. seven children of your own plus parents, siblings, grandkids, cousins, in-laws, etc.

2. a house with one bathroom

3. two days in which to wax floors, wash woodwork, repaint a room or two and clean out the gold fish bowl

4. one 30-pound turkey

5. one very small refrigerator

6. the ability to rise from a warm bed at 5 a.m. to face (before having coffee) the cold and terribly naked-looking body of the turkey, on its back, legs spread, waiting to be stuffed

7. a minimum of two tables, one designated as “the little kids’ table,” the purpose of which is to totally humiliate the oldest child stuck there

8. 25 pounds of potatoes and a burly man to mash them

9. one gallon of gravy made from the pan drippings while 10 guests crowd around the stove talking and getting in your way and asking, “So when do we eat?”

10. one out-of-tune piano on which a second grader can play “Chopsticks” repeatedly

11. six or seven homemade pies

12. real butter

Maybe real butter is no big deal to you in this age of abundance and availability. We usually had margarine, and real butter was for holidays. It was special.

That sense of specialness, of “holiday,” was like magic at our house. It was present in the hand-crocheted heirloom tablecloth my mother painstakingly ironed, the candles we lit, the bowl of nuts, the polished silverware, the folded napkins. My parents worked hard every day, Dad with his job and Mom with her babysitting business, plus having a big family, house and yard to care for. Yet they took the holiday gathering in stride. They could have used paper plates, prepackaged food or not invited everyone. But that wasn’t what Thanksgiving was about.

It was about waking in the morning to the smell of onions and celery, parsley and sage, while my parents made the dressing as a team. Then came the wonderful aroma of roasting turkey. It was about the house being too crowded, too warm and noisy, not from football on TV, but from talk and laughter. It was about multiple generations coming together. It was about garnet red cranberry sauce, like a heap of gems in a bowl, and pitted black olives stuck on the ends of little kids’ fingers. It was about honoring our blessings: each other, enough to eat, a home, loving and being loved, the harvest of lives well lived. It was about thankfulness.

I can still see us in the old house, finally seated around the two crowded tables with the turkey and all the trimmings, but one chair empty. Dad would call out, “Mother! Won’t you please come to the table? We’re waiting for you.” But she would have just remembered one more thing to do in the kitchen. From the cupboard on the back porch she’d grabbed a pint jar of her pickled crab apples and arrange the rosy brown orbs in a cut glass dish. Why? Because that was another way to show her love, and it was Thanksgiving.

I hope you’ve learned a thing or two. Be confident. You’ll find your own way, but no matter what, may your home overflow with family love, and may your butter be real. Happy Thanksgiving!

— Candace Brown was born on Vashon Island to parents Howard and Rosalie Willsie and still has family here. A graduate of Vashon High School, class of 1971, she left the Island to attend college. She now lives in Tacoma, where she is a freelance writer and musician who performs the classic jazz of the 1920s and ’30s with her husband Dave.