While I enjoy watching the Food Channel, I’m not a foodie. I come from a family that eats the basic provisions. We’re not big on spices, or fancy dishes. My mom is a good cook. She will tell you that she isn’t, she is modest that way. She has cooked for our family for decades and if you’ve seen any one of us, you know we aren’t starving. Her potato soup with its simple ingredients, has the power to heal bruised hearts, tired souls and the common cold. I think it’s the love she puts into her cooking. Love enhances food more than exotic ingredients ever could.

I love her meatloaf. It was a staple for my sister and I growing up. It’s just a modest meatloaf consisting of hamburger, onion, crackers, egg, salt, and catsup, but I wouldn’t trade it for any meal made by a Food Network chef. It’s delicious. Occasionally, mom will feel the urge to enhance or revise her recipes. She thinks her family will get tired of the same fare. One time she decided to shake things up and “doctored up” her meatloaf using seasonings. It was good, but it wasn’t her traditional meatloaf. It wasn’t home. I tease her now about sticking with her comfort food recipes and tell her “Now, don’t go messing with perfection. Stick with what works, Mom.”

Food, like an old song, can evoke memories and the emotions that come with them. Food can take you home. That’s never clearer than during the holidays. The holidays are a time for tradition. It’s not a time to go rogue with new ingredients in the cornbread dressing or to become health conscious.

If you want to make a table surrounded by salivating people wearing stretchy pants mad, try converting and serving their favorite holiday dish to a low-calorie, sugar-free or low-fat version. Be prepared to duck as the rolls are thrown. That scene would make quite the Norman Rockwell painting.

There are things that matter more than how food tastes. There’s family history in grandma’s chocolate pie, her tea towels, your mother’s rolling pin, and dad’s coffee cup. The most important aspect of tradition is the people around the table; those present and in the past. We carry them with us. There are many this season with empty chairs around their table. Those chairs are filled with sweet memories that are to be cherished. It’s said that great love brings great loss. It’s important that we don’t allow the levels of our grief or depression to overshadow what we have to be thankful for every day. Like a patient friend, memories can slowly transition over time from a sharp sadness to a soft warm gratitude, if we allow it. What we choose to hold on to can either strengthen us or it poisons and destroys us.

Sometimes I think we have trivialized words like “gratitude” so much that they don’t truly resonate any more. True thanksgiving and gratitude are a choice, a lifestyle.

This holiday season I wish you and your family peace and an abundance of love and family tradition. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.” I’m blessed and I know it.

I’m looking forward to my mother’s cornbread dressing on Christmas Day. She only makes it twice a year. I think I’ll call her and make sure she isn’t changing a thing.

Pam Lowe is the editor of the Clay County Courier in Corning, Arkansas. Readers may contact her at pamlowe@claycountycourier.com.