Category: Family

Family, Shrinking holidays, Thanksgiving

The Incredible Shrinking Thanksgiving Holiday

Mona Alvarado Frazier
Every year the window for Thanksgiving Day shortens. Philosophically, we can say that thanks giving should be every day and that is something to strive for but if we talk just about the holiday, wouldn’t you agree that it has shrunk to a blip between Halloween candy and Christmas trees, with a short layover on Black Friday?



When I reach back into my childhood, Thanksgiving began a week before the day and ended when we returned to school after the holiday. During the week before, we drew pictures in class, learned what American history said about Thanksgiving, wrote essays and went to Mass.

On the day of Thanksgiving, I remember the knock on the back porch and finding a cardboard box filled with a cold whole chicken, apples, cans of green beans, a sack of flour, and potatoes. My mom looked relieved and the rest of us wondered who put the box at our door. Our holiday began that way for several years when we lived on Felicia Court in the projects. Between the neighbors and relatives, there were plenty of vegetables but they tasted so much better with roast chicken. I don’t remember anything other than the aromas, the family, and our artistic renderings of turkeys and pilgrims stuck on the refrigerator door.


By the time I was ten, I didn’t want to open the back door when I heard a knock on Thanksgiving Day. I was embarrassed. The next year my mom went to the church to pick up a food basket the night before. The next year she was able to buy her own chicken. After that, we moved up to Rose Park and we began celebrating the day at the relative who had a house, not a small apartment. That’s when I remember the noisiness and laughter of extended family, playing with cousins, sneaking more pie, and the energy from the festivities.

Once we had our own families, our holiday began after work on Wednesday night and ended with collapsing on the couch for the weekend. We alternated between homes, shared the cooking and the leftovers. Now it was whether using foil, butter, or oil was better for the moistest turkey, or which pie was the best. We ended the day with a family basketball game. If you could pick up a ball, you played. And that’s the way it was for several years—a solid ritual.

The plan this year was for my siblings in Ventura County to pack up the families and celebrate Thanksgiving in Fresno with my sister. My mom has been there since Halloween and we were to bring her back after Thanksgiving. You know what happens with the best-laid plans.

This year the holiday shrunk so severely, that our Thanksgiving Day plans are in the air. Two of my three kids are working on Black Friday, the day before turkey day, one at 8 p.m and the other at midnight. Since our time together shriveled to a few hours, I decided that our family would go out to a restaurant to celebrate. That’s been my secret wish for many years.

Now my brother’s kids want him to stay in VC. Yesterday, my sister had a major unplanned expense she can’t go to Fresno either. This is the first time in our life that we may spend Thanksgiving Day without my mother. I get a lump in my throat when I think about it. Leave my kids here in VC and go to Fresno or not? And what if my mom’s not around for next Thanksgiving? The questions whirl around me and my feelings bounce around in my chest.

Since I can remember, Thanksgiving Day was spent with family and that’s what it is about, not the chicken or the turkey, not whose house we visited, or what game we played. 


What if my family goes to Fresno on a Wednesday morning and comes back Thursday afternoon? Or the weekend? That might work, because maybe thanks giving day is any day we choose. 


Family, Latino Family Traditions, Strong Women

Remembering Mama

Mona Alvarado Frazier
      A couple of years ago my mom began telling us more stories about her mother or maybe I started listening more carefully. Her mother died when she was twelve, six years after her father died. Her stories are all I know of my grandmother except for one picture. Its a photo of a tall thin man in a dark suit and hat standing next to a short pleasantly plump woman who looks very young. She is holding an infant and a toddler is standing at her side. This is one of the stories she tells.

     My mother was fourteen when my father kidnapped her from her father’s hacienda in Siloa, Guanajuato. It was planned, they had to run away because my grandfather didn’t want his daughter marrying a ranch hand. They came to Pomona during the Mexican revolution of 1912. Six children later (you know one of your uncles died) and at the age of thirty my mother became a widow. 

     The kids in our neighborhood came to our house regularly. That was because my mother was different from all the other mothers in my neighborhood. Sometimes Adela and I were in the front yard drawing a hopscotch on the sidewalk or jumping rope and mama would come outside and join us in our games. She was like a big kid jumping up and down on the sidewalk. After she played with us, everyone would gather on the porch, surrounding her while she told us fairy tales or animal stories. None of the other mothers played with us or told us tales. She was a fun mom.
     Mama never wore her apron except when she was cooking.  When we went to the market she wore her nice dress. She carefully combed her wavy black hair. Her dark brown eyes had long, long black lashes and her defined eyebrows stood out against her light peach colored skin.  She liked to comb her hair in different styles.  One time when she was trying to put the front of her hair in curls, like the comic strip girl, “Tillie the Toiler,” she burned her forehead with the hot iron.  But she didn’t give up.  She tried again and curled her hair into little ringlets on her forehead, pulling one down to cover the burn.  
     She took us to a lot of places.  On the 16th of September, we walked downtown to hear the political speeches and the Grito de Dolores.  Every week we went to the Pomona City Library. We never turned our books in late or damaged them; she taught us to be careful with books.  Once a month we all went to the movie theater in downtown Los Angeles, where they showed Mexican movies in Spanish. She liked the movies.  

     Mama was also curious about a lot of things. She liked to know what was going on in the world so every day she heard “Despertador” (Wake Up) on the radio.  Once a week we got the Herald Examiner in English.  I read the newspaper to her while she worked in the kitchen. 

     Sometimes Mama would take us to the Protestant church services besides the Catholic Mass. In the summertime she sent us to Bible Vacation School with Reverend Crawford.  Every day the Reverend and his wife picked us all up and took us to their church school.  I still remember some of the songs we sang.

      On laundry days Mama made pancakes.  She was the only mother in the neighborhood that made pancakes. On other days we had thick oatmeal and warm homemade bread or steaming hot beans and freshly made tortillas.  One of the neighborhood boys, Loreto, came over every laundry day.  He loved her pancakes. Laundry day took hours. Mama loaded the big pot onto the bricks in our backyard and lit the fire. Then Concha and I helped her scrub clothes in our washtubs.  Our tubs were filled with cool water and soap; we would scrub them on our metal washboards. When the water, in the big pot, boiled Mama added our clothes, one by one, stirring them in with a big stick.  While the clothes boiled we  emptied our washtubs and filled them up with more water.  Mama would use her big stick to pick clothes out of the boiling water and drop them into our washtubs. When they cooled down, Concha and I  picked them up and wrung them out, squeezing and twisting the water out. Then we would pile the clothes into the laundry basket. The next day was ironing day.  She took the clothes down, ironed and folded them.  She even ironed the pillowcases.  Mama was very neat and clean.

     After Papa died, Mama began working in a sewing factory.  Catarino and Eluterio were twelve and thirteen years old but they worked to help the family. Concha was ten and took care of me and Adela.  We took care of the house, the chickens and the rabbits.  


     Mama still played hopscotch and jump rope with us when she wasn’t busy.  She still welcomed the neighborhood kids and told us stories on the porch of our house and she continued to make pancakes on laundry day until she died a few days after her thirty eighth birthday in 1940.  


     I hope you share stories about your mother with your children today, and that they listen, and I wish you a lovely Mother’s Day.  Be well.