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Thanksgiving is for family, food, football and plenty of thanks.

From high school until college, I was practicing football on Thanksgiving Day. In high school, we had the third round of the state playoffs to prepare for and in college, we would be getting ready for the last regular season game.

Tracey remembers cooking the gravy for her family on Thanksgiving Day before we caught a plane later that day for an ECU Pirates away game.

I remember the time around Thanksgiving when I was coaching high school ball at Riverside. Herbie Rogers, Hank Tice and I would paint the field on Thanksgiving Day morning, complete with hash marks and numbers. We would practice after that, then go eat Thanksgiving lunch. We would carry home a player who was not as fortunate as us.

Even in college, coaches tried to get players to take home their teammates who lived far away. Sometimes they would have meals for players who didn’t want to travel to a teammate’s home. They would have it in the Murphy Center or a hotel.

In high school, we had the motto that we would be playing when it was time to start singing Christmas carols, and it happened most seasons.

Mrs. Reba would have more food that a family could eat, even more than a player could eat!

I would eat collards and potato mash up until I couldn’t eat any more.

My daughter, Hope, eats collards on Thanksgiving and anytime she can score some from King Chicken. She likes a “mash-up” too, trained by her Pop.

Why don’t you pray to God for all that we are thankful for and the many blessings we have to be grateful for. Be careful traveling, if you do so this time of year. See you next week.

They were the best of times with the best of friends in the best of places, Washington, N.C., the Original Washington!

Harold Jr.