A time to inventory our bountiful blessings as well as our families

It's a running joke in my large family that every year, along about Oct. 1, my wife starts trying to sabotage Thanksgiving. This has gone on intermittently for many years, and here's how the trouble generally starts:

"Can't we have something different this year?" Anne asks. "I'm so tired of turkey. How about cassoulet?"

"Cassoulet!" I yelp in protest. "You mean that greasy French stuff with lamb and beans and sausage? I hate lamb. And besides, cassoulet is downright un-American at Thanksgiving."

"Well, what about fried chicken? I hate turkey. Or prime rib? The children all love prime rib," she says.

"Yeah, we could do prime rib. And all it would cost for 20 or so people would be $400," I say.

My financial argument, though, is a smoke screen. The truth is, Thanksgiving dinner — meaning roast turkey, old-fashioned cornbread dressing with sausage and sage, mashed potatoes drowned in gravy and assorted accompaniments — is my favorite meal of the year, as indeed Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Maybe it goes back to my childhood growing up in a Southern orphanage, when Thanksgiving was the only good and plentiful meal of the year.

But while I come from a countrified culture, Anne came from a nontraditionalist California one (her parents were both actors), and besides, there always was the matter of the boring turkey, and she is a world-class cook of many sophisticated dishes.

"Why can't we do it at somebody else's house this year?" she asks from time to time.

Anne and I and our yellow Labrador, Dixon, live in the same small, white wooden cottage in West Los Angeles that I made a down payment on as a wedding present to her 36 years ago.

At that time, I had four sons by a first marriage, and Anne was one of two daughters of divorced parents. When we married, our then-called nuclear family settled into a friendly holiday routine: Thanksgiving dinner would be at our house and everybody would come. My boys would go to their mother's house for another Thanksgiving dinner Nov. 27, which is her birthday.

This holiday routine was happy and harmonious, and continued in this manner through the years as my sons grew up, got married and began to have their own children.

Somewhere along the way, though, Anne began to weary of the turkey — and, she alleged, of the mess I made in the kitchen. After I am done baking a big cast-iron pan of cornbread and assembling the dressing — that is, adding the butter, the turkey and chicken stock, the sausage and sage, and making a dark roux and adding plenteous stock for the gravy — the kitchen looks like a tornado hit.

But, happily, this year, as in all years so far, my graceful wife has once again stopped talking about cassoulet and somebody else's house and agreed that Thanksgiving will proceed as usual.

So midafternoon Thanksgiving Day, the family will troop in. Everybody will have brought something for the dinner. And while the grandchildren — some of them now teenagers — race around, chase the dog and play games, the adults (men in dress shirts and ties, women in nice dresses) will happily chatter and pitch in to get the dinner set up.

Then, with plates heaped high, we will assemble, 21 of us this year (Anne's father, Don, and her mother's longtime companion, Peter, are gone now), at two tables in our small dining room. Before anyone dives in, I will rap a spoon on a glass and, when everyone gets quiet, I will give thanks again for all our blessings: that we have a close-knit family, that we've all turned out pretty well, that we've survived many a physical and emotional upheaval, that we have plenty to eat in a world where many go hungry, that we have shelter and clothes, and that we are citizens in a nation where, so far, we won't be jailed, tortured or killed for what we believe or say.

And perhaps that's why I treasure this holiday so much — the annual opportunity to inventory and acknowledge all that I have to be grateful for, including that, in the end, Anne and the rest of our family truly love Thanksgiving, just as it is.

Karl Fleming is author of "Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir." He wrote this commentary for the Los Angeles Times.