Our family's Thanksgiving reunion has been in the works for months, but all that really matters is that my mother is already cooking and freezing the dinner she plans to serve.

I don't know what to make of that. Probably best not to ask for too many details and go with the flow. My mother is kind of crazy that way. She cooks in mysterious ways.

Plus, she's excited. Bursting at the seams is more like it. The proudest senior in her all-seniors community in the Arizona desert.

Her children are coming. Her grandchildren, too. We're all descending on her house for an 80th birthday party/holiday gathering. We'll be there, a baker's dozen. From Idaho, California and Hawai'i.

Even though my mother's birthday was earlier this year, Thanksgiving became the only time we could get together.

In so many ways, it's the perfect occasion to embark on a family adventure like this. It's a holiday when family and friends — better if you have both — can celebrate the ties that bind them.

And who says you can't put birthday candles on a pumpkin pie?

For me, Thanksgiving has served as a vehicle to bring together people for as long as I can remember.

When I was a boy, my father, a college professor, would sometimes invite students to our home, people who had no family in Hawai'i. In a way, our family was just as orphaned as they were, because our relatives lived on the Mainland and no one could afford to travel.

My mother cooked turkey with every trimming imaginable, from that awful frozen salad she loved to a wild-rice casserole I could never get enough of — the one with the canned mushrooms and an entire stick of butter that we cooked in a carport closet.

The first time my in-laws spent time with my family was at a Thanksgiving dinner at my mother's old house. It was more awkward than anything else.

Our reunion this week will be the first time since 1994 that my siblings and I will have brought our families together, so the buzz in my house is palpable.

My daughters are so thrilled at the idea of seeing everyone, especially their cousins, that their grandmother could serve cold cuts and they wouldn't care.

This will be the Thanksgiving that creates memories they'll have for the rest of their lives.

Of aunties and uncles around a family feast. Of singing happy birthday to tutu. Of a frozen salad they'll mostly ignore and a wild-rice casserole they won't get enough of, even after seconds.

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.