In the rush of the holiday season, Thanksgiving gets a bit of a bad rap. It used to be the official start of the season, but now it’s more like a bridge between Halloween and Christmas.

And despite debate over Thanksgiving’s true history in America, we really should refocus and give the holiday the attention it deserves. Any holiday that revolves around food is one I can get behind. And more important, the older I get, the more I appreciate my family’s efforts to preserve Thanksgiving traditions. The simple act of gathering year after year speaks volumes.

I can close my eyes, breathe in deeply and conjure that childhood Turkey Day smell. It gets my mouth watering and makes my heart happy.

My husband and I have been arguing for well over 10 years now about Thanksgiving potato products. Everyone in my family knows that Thanksgiving is for my mom’s sweet potatoes — with pecans on top, thank you very much — and classic mashed potatoes. It’s never, not ever, about any other form of potato casserole.

We also all know that year after year we will politely put a heap of my grandmother’s ambrosia — a questionable concoction of pineapples, mandarin oranges and whipped cream — on our plates and never eat it. After dinner, we will unbutton our fat pants and make room for my daddy’s pecan pie or my cousin Sara’s pumpkin cheesecake. These are traditions you just do not mess with.

I was also lucky to grow up with a healthy tradition of packing in family, along with extended family and friends that are like family, one on top of the other. It is loud and chaotic and loving, and there is always a cousin or two or three to play with. Basically, everything you want your kids to associate with holiday memories.

The kids’ table of my childhood was a rickety green soft vinyl-topped card table brought up from the basement for the occasion and covered with a plastic turkey-themed tablecloth. To this day, we have one table for the Old Heads, one for the Middles (my husband and my generation) and one super-packed and chaotic table for the Littles.

At some point between dessert and dishes, one of the adults will holler and throw all of the youngest family members onto the couch for a squirming, awkward family photo. I am now the instigator of this picture of my own kids and their cousins.

This year, in addition to my 5- and 8-year-olds, I will have a 16-week-old celebrating his first Thanksgiving. I fully anticipate passing him around from the Old Head table to the Middles and throwing him right on top of that cousin-couch-photo Littles pile!

In recent years, we have lost some our oldest family leaders but are steadily gaining a new generation of beautiful turkey-and-potato-loving heathens. And all these traditions they’ll carry on.