Will you be hosting Thanksgiving dinner at your house this year? If not, then you will be among the millions of Americans who will be traveling this week in order to eat Thanksgiving dinner at Grandmother’s house, (or the house of another relative). How we travel, and the cost of a typical Thanksgiving dinner, has changed over the years.
When I was a little kid, there wasn’t a specific Thanksgiving dinner tradition. If my mother decided to cook Thanksgiving dinner, than we would have it at home. My grandmother, (my father’s mother), lived with us, which made it easy to spend time with her on Thanksgiving, (and through the rest of the year).
I think we traveled across state lines to visit with my mother’s mother, (my grandmother), once or twice for Thanksgiving. I was under the age of seven, but even to me, it was obvious that this was not a trip that my father enjoyed.
My mother was legally blind, which means that my father had to do all of the driving to my grandmother’s house, and all of the driving to get us back home. I had two younger siblings (at that time), which meant he was driving miles through the snow with a car full of bored little kids. Needless to say, it was very rare that we would spend Thanksgiving with my mother’s mother.
If I had to guess, I would say that the last time my family made that trip was probably around 1978. At that time, ten gallons of gas cost $6.70. A turkey dinner that would feed ten people cost about $15.50 back then.
Not too many people would have considered flying instead of driving to grandmother’s house that year, because it was too difficult to figure out what a plane ticket would actually cost. The Airline Deregulation Act was signed on October 24, 1978, just a few weeks before Thanksgiving of that year.
By 2006, I was all grown up and married. My husband and I moved from the Midwest to California in 2005. We didn’t have the money to fly home to visit my family on Thanksgiving that year, but we were able to spend it with his family, who lived in California.
We drove a short distance to the home of his sister and brother-in-law. In 2006, ten gallons of gas cost $25.89. A turkey dinner that would serve ten people cost around $38.10. We didn’t have to fly that year, which was nice. 2006 was the year that the airlines started making restrictions about the amount of liquids or gels that passengers could bring with them on the plane. This was the year that the TSA started confiscating everything from large bottles of shampoo, to snow globes.
This year, 2011, Thanksgiving will be spent with my husband’s family. In October, we flew to Illinois in order to attend my sister’s wedding. We can’t afford to fly back out there again, so soon. Our flights were not so bad this year, in part because the TSA has calmed down a little bit, and started using some common sense about what types of items to confiscate. This year, ten gallons of gas cost $34.26. A turkey dinner that would feed ten people now costs about $49.20.
Image by Rene Schwietzke on Flickr