Giving more thanks for pie

I can't spend a lot of time on this particular post because I am prepping for Hanukkah (first candle tomorrow night, for those of you keeping track) and Thanksgiving, Thursday at our house.
For the first time in years Thanksgiving will be at our home. Our children and our siblings will be under one roof (weather and airport permitting) and around the table debating whether jellied or whole cranberry sauce is better, for the first time in a very long time.
I am looking forward to hosting and having leftovers.
There will be three kinds of pie, marshmallows on the sweet potato casserole and leftovers.
The past few years we have gone to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. 
Moving the holiday here is bitter sweet for me. 
My mom -- the main attraction for our annual Thanksgiving journey -- passed away in February. 
So this Thanksgiving, even with its pie and leftovers, will be different.
Our family has been blessed while living in Chicagoland, and before in Orlando, to celebrate many other holidays with our extended families. Transplants like ourselves and natives, who extended dining room tables to make room for more, have adopted us for many holidays, but Philadelphia was the Thanksgiving destination.

Whenever there is a pie on the table, it seems to be a conversation starter. About a year ago a friend of ours told us the story of Beth Howard, a woman he knew from his web production days, who has taken pie to a whole new level. She proclaimed pie had healing qualities. 
He had experienced it firsthand when he shared making one of her apple pies from scratch with his daughter as they worked the dough and worked out an emotional crisis.
I immediately "Googled" Howard and have since run my fingers through her book "Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Pie."
My friend met Howard, author, blogger and pie baker, when she was a very successful web producer. She later quit that lucrative gig in early 2000 to pursue pie. Eventually, she wound up watching A-list celebrities as well as pedestrian pie lovers enjoy her wares in LA, while baking for a restaurant there.
Howard, who now lives in THE American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, is a celebrity. When not throwing Pie Parties and baking and selling pie at the Gothic House's seasonal Pitchfork Pie Stand (closed for the season), she has continued writing and been healing others thru pie.
A year ago, while the country was reeling from the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, Howard packed up her pie plates and took a team of volunteer pie makers and servers from Iowa, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Georgia to help the people of Newtown, Conn., deal with their grief with fruit pies.
Her act of kindness and healing was featured on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360. Howard -- who has another book coming out in April, also returned to Connecticut in March to teach pie baking and spoke on her life experiences at a public library.
Sadly, Howard experienced firsthand how "pie does help heal." 
She threw herself even deeper into the pie promotion biz in 2009, after her husband of six years died unexpectedly from a ruptured aorta.
My husband and I loaded up the grocery cart at Costco earlier today with pumpkin and pecan offerings. We heard a Costco employee claim the company expected to move 1 million pies today.
During our last two Thanksgivings in Philadelphia we introduced the rest of the clan to the Costco pies. It was an easy offering for a table that sometimes sported turkeys our cousins raised and de-feathered for dining at my aunt's house.
Truthfully I have not had better than the warehouse market's pumpkin pies -- why bake?
But I am going to make an apple pie for Thursday. I am going to make Beth Howard's basic apple pie recipe.
And I am going to think of my mom as I count our blessings and I am baking.
You can never have too much pie.