Does your family have a recipe that you just can’t do without at the holidays? Ours sure does! It’s my mom’s dressing recipe handed down to her by her mom. This year due to the passing of my mom, it was my turn to make it. I could have let Papa (my dad) do it, but I really felt overwhelmingly compelled to do it. This is one of those recipes that none of us kids had really ever seen being made. It just magically appeared every Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don’t know how that was possible, but it’s the truth! We all really love this dressing as simple and we all usually took plenty home to eat later.
Papa very sweetly gave me the recipe as he remembered it. So on Thanksgiving morning, I embarked on my quest to replicate this recipe as best as I could, all along praying that I could do it justice. Between my daughters and myself, we made it. I was so full of emotion that day as our whole family gathered. I was terrified that it would not be what we remembered. I was missing my mom so much and worried about the rest of our family and their emotions. It was a day full of ups and downs.
A legacy can be as simple as a recipe. So many people try to make legacies complicated. But, they don’t have to be. This was a simple thing, and sometimes it’s in the simplest of things that we remember the most. My mom would laugh at me for writing about this. But this dressing is something that we remember about the holidays. Of course, it’s not the only thing we reminisce about, there are plenty more holiday memories. But this is a start. And if you’re wondering how the dressing turned out; it was great! So great that I doubled it for Christmas! It was exactly how we remembered it.
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