Drenched in the warm aroma of a home-cooked meal, the dining room offered up a plethora of turkey-day delicacies split between a seating of adults carefully filling their plates and a kids’ table featuring an aggressively disproportionate amount of turkey to anything else.
This, paired of course with a healthy amount of football on TV and in the backyard, delivered a picturesque family Thanksgiving.
This family, however, was not of blood, but comprised of those who’ve called Kansas, South Carolina, Texas, Maine and even California home. For a day, they were all newfound kin in the spirit of the holiday and settling into their new home – Tuscaloosa, Ala.
UA communications professor Angela Billings hosted the dinner. New to Tuscaloosa and the University, she and her husband, TCF Professor Andrew Billings, came to the University from Clemson University in South Carolina where they had their own Thanksgiving tradition.
“We took in strays,” Billings said. “It started as us and one or two people not from the area, sometimes people we weren’t even close friends with necessarily. Eventually we had nearly 30 people at Thanksgiving.”
Billings, originally from Elkhard, Ind., noted that it can be difficult meeting new people in a new location and that it can be especially difficult to be away from family and old friends during the holidays. Their Thanksgivings began humbly as a small family dinner for them and their first child, Nathan. However, as they began welcoming more and more into their home, they had to move the dinner into a bigger house and borrow chairs and tables from the University.
While these dinners brought a familiar Thanksgiving to many around campus, Billings soon realized that it wasn’t only friends, faculty and graduate students who were without a true Thanksgiving meal.
“A few years ago I found out that a student had spent Thanksgiving alone in his apartment,” Billings said. “He had a TV dinner, and it just broke my heart. From that point on I try to make sure my students know that they will always have a seat at our table.”
This fall, Billings and her family relocated to Tuscaloosa. Although they’ve enjoyed the relocation, Billings said she was initially concerned about this year’s Thanksgiving when no students had taken her up on her usual offer.
However, once Nov. 24 dawned, she was setting the table for 11, many of whom were taking in their first Alabama Thanksgiving as well.
Among the collection were the Billings and their two children, Nathan and Noah; communications professor and forensics team director Robert Imbody and his wife and two children; old friends and recent imports from Kansas State; communications professor Janis Edwards, an experienced faculty member at UA and Shai Vogler, a freshman from Texas.
While the professors have made their home in Alabama, Vogler remains a native of her hometown in Amarillo, Texas, but decided to stay on campus during the short break.
“I knew a lot of great people here,” Vogler said. “I knew they’d make me feel at home.”
Not long after arriving at the Billings’, the boys and the Imbody’s younger daughter, Josie, filed outside for a game of two-hand-touch football. The game starred the youngest of the crowd, with the older generations providing verbal support and a block or two. After everyone had gotten their energy out, all made their way into the dining room.
Food, football and talk of both ate at the hours until the night’s end, at which time impressive amounts of turkey and pie had disappeared from the table, leftovers were doled out and friendships had been forged.
“I loved it,” Volger said. “Everyone was really nice and welcoming and just made us all feel like family.”
Next November some may rejoin their own families at the dinner table, but the Thanksgiving tradition will live on.
“I make sure my students know, be it this semester, next semester, or later on, you’ll always have a place at our table,” Billings said. “No one should spend Thanksgiving by themselves.”
