William Albee can't remember exactly what he had for Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 29, 1934, just that it was delicious and filling.

That wasn't the case for Sarah Warren.

"No turkey for me that day," she said. "I couldn't have anything to eat."

That's because she was in a Charlotte, N.C., hospital, recovering from an emergency appendectomy. It was the same day in 1934 that Albee gathered with a multitude of extended family in Rhode Island.

Warren and Albee were two of seven Westminster-Canterbury residents — all in their 80s and 90s — who settled into a semi-circle of comfortable furniture on Wednesday to talk about Thanksgivings past.

"My family had been living in Paris for over five years," said Albee, "and that Thanksgiving in '34 was after we had returned to the States. It was the first time we had gotten together with our other relatives in a long time, and that included 16 kids.

"We always started out on Thanksgiving Day with a game of hares and hounds. It was a family tradition. The hares were given a little bag of shredded newspaper and a head start of maybe five minutes or so. Every time they changed directions, they had to drop some scraps of newspaper to make a trail. The rest of us, the hounds, had to try and catch them. It always left us worn out and really hungry."

Warren's 1934 Thanksgiving, by contrast, was anything but traditional.

"I had plans to go to the Virginia-North Carolina football game in Chapel Hill with my boyfriend that day," she recalled, "but then I got sick. My boyfriend was a real gentleman, though — he stayed and came to the hospital to be with me."

For Kay Albee, William's wife, Thanksgiving always takes on a special poignancy.

"My mother died on Thanksgiving when I was 5 years old," she said. "She was in the house, very sick, and I was playing hopscotch outside when my father came out and told me.

"My Dad raised four of us kids after my Mom died. I've always been thankful for that."

Part of what makes Thanksgiving bittersweet is its inevitable delayed gratification. John Becker became accustomed to that.

"We would eat at my grandparents' house in upstate New York," he said, "and my grandfather used to have us kneel down next to our chairs for a long prayer of Thanksgiving. At first it was general, and then he would become very specific in asking God for help, mostly in matters dealing with the weather."

For Cecil and Eston Harvey, Thanksgiving was observed in Appomattox, where they both grew up.

"In my family, the kids always ate after the adults," said Eston Harvey, who went on to get a PhD from Harvard and work with the State Department in Washington, "and we were always afraid there would be nothing left for us but gizzards and necks."

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Harvey later dealt with problems of hunger in undeveloped countries.

Cecil Harvey was never quite sure who was going to be at Thanksgiving dinner from year to year.

"We always had an aunt or an uncle or some other older person living with us," she said. "That's just what families did for each other back then."

Although she remembers an occasion when that generosity didn't extend to her.

"My father sent me downstairs with some applesauce to give to my aunt," she said, "but it never made it. I ate it."

Rene Clower's favorite Thanksgiving memory gets sweeter with the passing of time. She and her husband, relative newlyweds, took advantage of his military leave during World War II by taking a train from Chicago to south Georgia for the holiday. A troop train.

"It was crowded with soldiers," she said, "and I had a hard time finding a place to sit. But when you're young and the whole world stretches out in front of you, everything is wonderful. It was an adventure."

This year, Clower is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first great-grandchild.

"I've been blessed in so many ways," she said.

Sarah Warren agreed. Still, time and dressing and pies eventually gave her a different perspective of the Thanksgiving meal itself.

"There's not a woman here," she said with a wry smile, "who hasn't spent several days preparing a Thanksgiving dinner, and then it's over in 30 minutes. And you have to do the dishes."