I've always thought Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on what I am thankful for in my life. And then there's the food-- lots of food.

Standing in a long line at the grocery store with an overflowing cart of goodies isn't my favorite part, but it is a right of passage.

Thanksgiving doesn't really come to life until I dig through my recipe card box and pull out 3 X 5 cards -- yellowed with age and stained with use, but golden to me.

I spent most of the past 20 Thanksgivings with friends, not family. This is the first Thanksgiving for me living in Utah, although each year of my childhood my family made the pilgrimage to my grandma's house in Murray.

The last few years, I spent Thanksgivings in San Francisco with other "orphans." Once I even brought my own chair on the MUNI bus across town just so I would have something to sit on once I arrived at my friend's loft apartment. Another year I served meals at Mo's Kitchen in the heart of the Tenderloin district.

Last year I drove to Calaveras Big Trees and had a campfire cook-out with a couple of friends. One aspect all of these Thanksgiving celebrations had in common was turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and a long list of other traditional trimmings.

This is where the real magic of Thanksgiving happens. It's not just the part about sitting down and breaking bread. For me, Thanksgiving happens in the preparation of the meal.

My favorite Thanksgiving memories are of being in grandmother's kitchen and learning the family recipes for cranberry sauce, stuffing, home baked rolls and pumpkin chiffon pie.

My grandma, who is now 89, doesn't bake as much as she used to. But when I was a child, from Thanksgiving all the way through New Year's, my grandmother's kitchen was the place to be.

She would make peanut brittle and date bars, Scottish shortbread, cheese balls cream puffs, date pudding and brown bread using recycled cans as baking tins.

My grandmother never measures anything. "A pinch of this, a dash of that," she would say. But each baking excursion needed a few helping hands.

When I was a child, the preparation for Thanksgiving dinner was the best -- all of the women and girls in the kitchen peeling potatoes, rolling out dough for dinner rolls, grinding cranberries in a hand-crank meat grinder, crushing toasted bread into homemade stuffing.

At first I tried to memorize each recipe, but there were just too many. That's when I began to write them down. There has even been an evolution over the years of most of the recipes. We don't use Crisco any more and the sugar for much of the baked goods has been cut down. Even new recipes have been added to the card file.

Each family has their own favorite recipes. I believe that passing those recipes down through the generations are what make the holidays that much more meaningful.