Room for more at family table

In his annual death-defying act, my husband retrieves the heavy table leaves that spend most of the year high on the closet shelf. We expand Table One to its farthest reaches.

Table Two is excavated from its dusty quarters in the basement. We set it down upon uncertain legs.

Then we step back and assess the dining room that has maxed out the way the oven maxes out with its occupying turkey. We count heads or, to be more exact, seats. And count again.

We've had a baby boom in our family. Since last Thanksgiving our younger generation has had a younger generation. All at once, the "children" have become parents. The parents and aunts and uncles have become grand and great and great-greats.

The comfort that we find in being together has never included a lot of elbow room, but this year, we will be 21, ranging over four generations from 89 years to 5 months old. And for the first time, the younger generations will outnumber their elders.

So we take out the ancient and cranberry-stained place cards and perform a quiet, unheralded rite of passage. The new majority will take over the big table. The minority will move -- back? forward? -- to the "kids" table.

It is no small joy to watch this extended family extend -- down in age and out into the future. But setting the table, my mind crisscrosses generations. Placing plastic sip cups next to my own grandmother's good china, I cannot help wondering what she would make of the family that now dines off of her inheritance. What will the first-timers, the small people who will taste their first lemon pie today, make of their tribe?

Sometimes I think I have spent my entire adulthood listening to Americans rue the end of the family. Even as we raised families.

It happened again last week when the Supreme Court in my Pilgrim state ruled in favor of gay marriage. One conservative fumed that the court had "tampered with our cultural DNA," as if culture were inherited along a double helix of religion and biology. Others reacted -- again -- as if the very idea of family, once frozen solidly in form, had now dissolved into a puddle.

I suppose we all look back in time as if we were still at the kids' table. From that vantage, our grandparents and their grandparents look like curators of tradition. We forget how many rules they defied or altered to create the families that provided our stability. Among those ancestors, wasn't there one who rebelled against the tradition of an arranged marriage, another who chose outside her ethnicity or his class?

Do we forget that the great melting pot of America is also the family cookware?

Thanksgiving, the most American holiday, celebrates the Pilgrims who left home for a religious freedom which they promptly denied to others. We are a nation of leavers, of emigrants who broke one family bond and then reestablished another. Over time, the family, like the human body, evolves, changes every cell, and yet remains recognizably familiar.

If there is a cultural DNA, it is the human need to belong. But what's changed continually is the strictures on who can belong. Over generations -- four, five, six, 10 -- the admissions requirements for membership into our diverse families have gradually opened up. We've granted and gained permission for families to extend as far as the leaves on a table.

The people who will soon find a seat in our own dining room are brought together by biology and choice. We were born, married, adopted, divorced, remarried into possession of a place card.

Among us is the first woman in the family to be divorced. Among us is a cousin adopted half a century ago when children were allocated by religion, as if faith were a biological trait to be fit. And a grandchild adopted just months ago across an ocean and a race. Among us are also couples created across faiths and within the same gender.

Would we seem like strangers to the elder, my grandmother, whose plates have held nearly a century of holiday meals? I don't know. But the babies who make their first appearance at this table will be no more surprised by us than by the mashed potatoes that make their first appearance this year, breaking tradition with a culinary clap of thunder.

So this day, as high chairs are squeezed between folding chairs, as one generation evolves into another, this is what we have learned: We make a family by making room.

Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.