This time of year is always filled with a mixture of joy and sadness for me. I love the fall colors, the cool weather, and the time to relax with friends and family. Since it’s “Thanksgivmukkah” this year, the joyful part is amplified, especially for two little boys who are thrilled they get to play dreidel and open presents as well as help me cook the Thanksgiving meal. But the sadness is there, too. Our Thanksgiving table is much smaller without the presence of my Dad, who died two years ago, his sister, who died in January, my brother, who is far away from us in many ways, and others who have been lost or have simply moved on over the years.

Such is life, I guess. There can be no true appreciation of happiness without experiencing the loss and loneliness that are the other side of the coin. Grief teaches us better how to love and vice versa.

The person I miss most, however, as I make my way into the kitchen today to start preparing dishes for our meal, is my mother, who died in 2001. She and I were extraordinarily different from one another, but a love of cooking and food was common ground. The happiest times I remember from my childhood center around Mom in the kitchen, preparing food for a party or a special meal. Later, when she was no longer able to cook much and I tried to make her recipes on my own, I would call her for advice and she would talk me through the steps. It was one of the few areas in which her self-confidence was unfailing, and her prideful daughter would accept her help.

I pulled my recipe box today, looking for something personal to add to our Thursday meal. I rarely use these old recipe cards anymore, for a number of reasons. One, I don’t cook as much as I’d like. Two, many of these recipes were written in a different era – before processed foods and our largely sedentary lifestyle were in full effect. So they are full of the fats, sugar, and carbs that were at one point necessary (or believed necessary) to sustain life in a rural farming community. They are old-school comfort food. And three, when I’m looking for something to make for dinner, like many of my generation, I find just searching the internet is often simpler than flipping pages in a book or digging through a box of cards.

As I look at these cards today, however, I realize what I’m missing when I just search for a recipe online. Right off the bat, I see my mother’s distinctive handwriting and feel a pang of longing for her presence. I was only 25 when she died, which is longer than some people get with their parents, but her loss still feels profound – a big hole in my adult life. Looking at her treasured recipes written in her own hand reminds me of some of my favorite dishes growing up, and makes me smile at her attention to detail and some of the quirks these cards reveal about her.

Citations were important when passing recipes from one household to another, and they also give some insight into the social dynamics of Mom’s world. I notice the names Mom has filled in on the “From the kitchen of…” space and I recognize other women I’ve known – both of my grandmothers, aunts, family friends, neighbors. One or two of the cards even appropriately credit both the original cookbook and the woman who modified the recipe to make it her own: “Betty Crocker and Gail Campos.”

On a couple of the cards she made a point to emphasize that the recipes were from “My mother,”  which I suppose was intended for me to be sure to distinguish between her mother and my paternal grandmother (who had a frosty relationship with my mom and is credited by first name only). On another card she actually crossed out the name of a neighbor who’d offended her at the top of a cookie bar recipe. She banished the neighbor, but kept the recipe. It just goes to show that good cooking transcends the boundaries of relationship dynamics. Relationships are what they are, but good food is serious stuff, people.

Some of the recipes are good old Southern fare – Pecan Pie, biscuits, cornbread dressing. Others, like Pacific Chicken, Quiche Lorraine,

and Chicken Kiev — were presumably gleaned from my parents’ time in California, where my brother and I were born and many of my parents close friends were Asian, European, and even (gasp!) Yankees. There are recipes that make me think of white gloves and ladies’ teas, like Strawberry Party Punch; and a simple recipe for peanut butter candy from my elementary school. Some are meticulously hand-written on cards, some scrawled on envelopes, some cut from the backs of ingredient boxes and bags and taped to the cards. The best recipes are spotted and smeared from years of use; and several favorites have duplicate cards. Mom could be a bit of a space cadet, like me, and I imagine she wanted to make copies of her favorites so they wouldn’t get lost or loaned out and never returned.

Now that I’m a mom, I wonder which dishes and meals will remind my kids of me down the line (here’s hoping it’s something that doesn’t involve a drive-thru). Lately I’ve been re-thinking my relationship with food, and the way I feed my family, and I find myself wondering how to bring forward traditions and create healthier habits at the same time. Today I’m also wondering, beyond the food itself, how to keep the voices of all the women in my family present in my kitchen and in my life. How to convey their love of food and family to my own children? How to preserve, in the Digital Age, something that can only be truly appreciated on a spotty, fraying, hand-written card?

There’s no easy answer, I know. So today I’m going to be thankful for the question, and the women – living and dead – who’ve inspired me to ask it. Now, back to the kitchen.

Happy Holidays!

MJ Pullen

M.J. Pullen is a distracted writer and the mom of two boys in Roswell, Georgia, where she is absolutely late for something important right now. Her books include quirky romantic comedies and playful women's fiction. She blogs erratically with writing advice, random observations, and reflections on raising very loud kids and dogs. Join her Distracted Readers newsletter list for updates, free content, giveaways and more.