{"id":2451623,"date":"2019-11-27T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=316744"},"modified":"2019-11-27T05:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T12:00:00","slug":"roger-marolt-they-came-for-religious-freedom-but-i-think-they-stayed-for-the-leftovers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/roger-marolt-they-came-for-religious-freedom-but-i-think-they-stayed-for-the-leftovers\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger Marolt: They came for religious freedom, but I think they stayed for the leftovers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Roger Marolt<\/strong>
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There\u2019s not much that can beat Thanksgiving as a kid in a ski town.<\/p>\n

Christmas was the headline grabber, so I think I took turkey day for granted way back when. As they say, we don\u2019t fully appreciate what we have until it is gone; I\u2019m talking about our youth in particular.<\/p>\n

Thanksgiving might still be my favorite holiday. It\u2019s that or Fourth of July. Independence Day has the long summer daylight and warm weather going for it, while Thanksgiving has early season skiing with family and friends gathered afterward in a more concentrated, indoor area conducive to wider participation in interesting and intense conversations (i.e. arguing). You definitely get more scuttlebutt over turkey and all the fixins served on the expanded dining room table than you do between bites of grilled hot dogs while sitting in lawn chairs watching the kids play Jarts (lawn darts).<\/p>\n

The things both holidays have in common are no gifts. Ironically, that\u2019s the best gift of all. There\u2019s nothing more pressure-packed than trying to come up with the perfect present for someone that is something they would never buy for themselves (surprise!), only to discover by the look on their faces when they open it that the reason they would never have bought it for themselves is because it is actually a thing they would never want. Hindsight is all too clear in the gift giving game and that is what hurts the most.<\/p>\n

A nice bottle of wine or maybe a side dish the hosts ask you to bring are nice to show up with, but neither requires a trip to the mall or an online jungle tour to produce. A salad is satisfying to people who have everything. Simple is best. No salad that takes more than 10 minutes to make is worth eating. If you can\u2019t toss the salad with three flips of the tongs, you have too much junk in it. Nobody would complain about just lettuce, tomatoes and croutons. You can easily pick out the tomatoes if you don\u2019t like them. That\u2019s not a chef\u2019s tip. It\u2019s advice from an experienced eater.<\/p>\n

Thanksgiving for mountain kids is simply the best. Adults may get excited for the official opening day of skiing, but for kids it is really something special. I can\u2019t explain it except to tell you that, from experience, it is magical. I think the magic of it lasts until about the time you become responsible for shoveling the walks, paying the utility bills and after you outgrow tunneling through snow banks. It\u2019s a shame we all do.<\/p>\n

I remember having a hard time sleeping before the first day of skiing. I can\u2019t recall the last time that happened. You have turned the corner onto the one-way street to adulthood when you get a bout of insomnia worrying about getting the turkey in the oven early enough or wondering if you have enough eggnog.<\/p>\n

We kids would ski from the opening bell until the last lift up each day of the four-day weekend. We spent Thanksgiving night stuffed in front of the tube watching the Dallas Cowboys play someone and could not have cared less about the football game, except for the tradition of having it in the background while we moved from the dinning room to the living room with huge slices of pumpkin pie hidden somewhere beneath a cornice of Cool Whip and washed down with a glass of apple cider over ice.<\/p>\n

It is hard to say whether the droning voices from the football game or the adults continuing to talk over steaming cups of Sanka made us so sleepy. As soon as we found out what tryptophan was, we blamed that. What we always resisted was admitting that a long day on the slopes wore us out. Adults always exaggerate the value of a good night\u2019s sleep \u2014 another way to tell if you are one.<\/p>\n

Friday, Saturday and Sunday we had dinners at dusk, lots of times still in our long underwear after skiing. That tradition was what gave leftovers a good name \u2014 a real casual treat! Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and green beans with mushroom soup poured all over tastes better each time you warm them up again. This was when I learned to love cranberries. Cranberry sauce is to stuffing what frosting is to cake. And the gravy! My great uncle Steve used to say, \u201cA man who doesn\u2019t like gravy ain\u2019t hardly human.\u201d He also used to tell us that his horse could have pulled the devil out of hell if you could have hooked a rope to him. Flavor doesn\u2019t only come from the food on Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n

Then one day someone thought I was old enough to do the dishes. I probably started out drying things and putting them away, but that was a short transition into actual pearl diving. This didn\u2019t make me stop loving Thanksgiving. It just made the day feel longer. I assumed longer meant better when it came to holidays, but that isn\u2019t necessarily the case. It just depends whose helping you.<\/p>\n

Roger Marolt loves it all except for the Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. He\u2019s watched it many times and still doesn\u2019t see the attraction. Email him at roger@maroltllp.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Marolt There\u2019s not much that can beat Thanksgiving as a kid in a ski town. Christmas was the headline grabber, so I think I took turkey day for granted way back when. As they say, we don\u2019t fully appreciate what we have until it is gone; I\u2019m talking about our youth in particular. Thanksgiving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 04:31:05","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}