He says something along the lines of: “I’m pretty sure the Pilgrims at Plymouth did not have pernil on their table during their Thanksgiving celebration.” (For the uninitiated, pernil is a traditional pork roast dish in many Caribbean countries.)

This �鶹ԭ�� Forum was written long before COVID-19. The author says her family will observe the holidays more privately this year and will heed all CDC guidelines. “There are a lot of treasured folks in our midst – and we are not taking chances.”

What? Pernil, rice and beans, rice and peas, yellow plantain casserole, Bustelo in abundant quantities, Dominican cake, tres leches and flan are not staples of everyone’s Thanksgiving dinner? Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

But I do know that just as the settlers who started this tradition, we Americans of Hispanic descent are as invested as everyone else in the celebration of Thanksgiving.

There are so many things to be grateful for: freedom of expression, friendships, free enterprise, educational opportunities and societal mobility, among countless more. In short, all the characteristics that make our country great.

Thanksgiving is a time when we, as a nation, put our problems on hold and reflect on our many blessings and good fortune.

How exactly do we do this? Well, apparently not in a one-size-fits-all fashion.

I was born in New York and have always lived in the United States except for four years I lived in the Dominican Republic as a child. And for as long as I can remember, my extended family’s Thanksgiving celebrations have been hosted by whoever happened to have the biggest house capable of accommodating our huge family: my maternal grandparents, my 12 aunts and uncles and their spouses, my 30-plus cousins, (and their significant others), and children, in addition to extended family in the area and out-of-town guests. It’s a dressy occasion, and while attendance is not “mandatory,” it’s understood by all that it is mandatory.

Over the past decade, however, given that our family is now split between New York City and Florida, attendance has declined a bit.  We now average between 60 and 70 people because not everyone can make it here. (But we keep in constant touch in other ways. Gracias, Facebook!)

Dinner is usually held around 8 p.m.  The gathering is filled with laughter, storytelling, the constant inventory of who and what dish has arrived and which ones are missing – and, of course, good music.

As you can imagine, the food is divided among different families. After all, home cooking for this small army is no small task. Luckily, my mom and aunts take charge of dividing the cooking responsibilities and they each have their specialty. My mom is the pastelon-queen (yellow plantain casserole); Tia Irene is the chicken-and-turkey-stew goddess; Tia Luisa and Tia Tago are Martha Stewart’s Dominican counterparts; Tia Caridad is a rice connoisseur; Tia Mary is a dessert expert, etc.

As for me and my generational counterparts, we are usually assigned the plasticware, beverages, green salad, etc. (You know, the really hard stuff). From time to time, however, we are also assigned some kind of “traditional” dish (such as the pernil), which using the language of today’s global economy, we often enthusiastically outsource to a bodega.

In light of my husband’s dismay at the inaccuracy (unauthenticity?) of our Thanksgiving dinner selections, and in the interest of exposing our daughters to mainstream culture, last year during Thanksgiving week I decided to enlist our daughters’ help in researching what the Pilgrims enjoyed at their Thanksgiving feast. I challenged our girls to research ingredients and preparation instructions and told them our immediate family of four would observe a mini-Thanksgiving dinner on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. So yes, I was going to debut in the turkey department!

And finally, at least for me, I was going to be able solve the “mystery” of the cranberry sauce I had heard about but didn’t know what it was for, what it tasted like, was it a dipping sauce for the vegetables, or was it meant to be eaten on its own?

My girls and I gathered plenty of information, drafted our grocery list, and enlisted the help of a Publix employee to help us find some of the ingredients. I’m happy to report that we made stuffing, cranberry sauce and gravy from scratch, in addition to some other stuff, and it was all edible!

And while I now know what the cranberry sauce is for, it will not become a staple of our meals anytime soon.

The exercise was enlightening, fun, and created great memories for our family.

It also provided an opportunity for our family – like everyone in the nation – to take part in this early American tradition that we have made our own.

Maritza Martinez ’00 ’05MA ’11MBA is director of the �鶹ԭ��’s Community Relations department.  She can be reached at Maritza.Martinez@ucf.edu.

This is a reposting from the �鶹ԭ�� Forum, a series of opinion columns from faculty, staff and students who serve on a panel for a year. A new column is posted each Wednesday on �鶹ԭ�� Today and then broadcast on W�鶹ԭ��-FM (89.9) between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday. Opinions expressed are those of the columnists, and are not necessarily shared by the �鶹ԭ��.

The girls carried their backpacks, lunchboxes and school projects in tow – or at least one optimistic parent would hope. This particular morning, our fifth-grader had a special project to turn in: a tri-fold rendition of Marie Curie’s biography. Her teacher gave three to four weeks of notice on the project with plenty of email reminders. I made sure my daughter checked out a research book, conducted her online research and finished the project three days before it was due because we would be out of town during the days leading up to the deadline.

However, just to be absolutely certain that she would have her project top of mind and would remember on her own to take it to school Monday, I asked her to go over the rubric to make sure she had not missed any of the required information, to which she replied that she was certain she had covered everything and she would leave “no points on the table.”

So, on Monday morning I asked the girls to gather their stuff and get in the car. Their things were supposed to be neatly piled on the counter closest to the door that leads to the garage, you know, for easy access and so that the things in view inevitably prompt an “Oh, I need to take this with me as I walk out the door” reaction – or again, at least a parent would hope. The girls got in the car and, like more times than I care to remember, my daughter did not put her biography project with her backpack and forgot it. 

Internally, I was incredulous that she forgot the project despite my subtle hints and suggestions night after night that she put all the things she needs to take to school in one pile, in view, so that they’ll be easy to grab in the morning, instead of placing stuff in the home office or in her bedroom and then hunting for them in the morning. 

After I just allowed them to make their way to the car and I went to the driver’s seat, I just sat for a minute, entertaining an internal debate over my role: Should I remind her? Should I not? What percentage of her grade depends on this project? What’s my role as a parent? If I do remind her, am I enabling her absent-mindedness and ridding her of ownership of her experiences?

I decided to go back in the house and have a moment of truth with my husband. I wanted to just let her show up to class without her project, while my husband, equally as frustrated, weighed heavily the impact this inaction on our part would have on our daughter’s grade. My desire to let her experience this setback was outweighed by my husband’s concern over the impact to her grade. 

Then to my delight on my way back to the car, I saw my daughter headed back into the house! I was pleased because she remembered on her own, albeit a bit late.

But at that point I saw she had come back into the house not for her project, but because she had forgotten her sunglasses. Her sunglasses! Seriously?

As I stood in the middle of the family room and steaming about what I was seeing, I called her back and proceeded to quiz her about the day’s date, whether she was certain she had all she needed, what about her biography project? Wasn’t it due TODAY?

She perked up immediately, a startled expression on her face, and rushed back to her room to get it. Had I not a multitude of times covered the importance of leaving everything in one place to minimize the chances of forgetting it? Not just as it relates to school projects, but her lunchbox, her violin, and yes, even her backpack that has been forgotten a time or two!

After I dropped my daughters off at school, my husband and I talked on the phone to express our disappointment, define our roles as parents and further discuss our options. In retrospect, we both agreed we should not have reminded her about the project, thus letting her experience a lesson of failure this time, a direct result of her lack of discipline and absent-mindedness. After all, isn’t our role as parents to provide guidance, to promote learning from failures, and to help glean lessons from setbacks?

Or at least, that’s the kind of parent I aspire to be.

I regret reminding her because a similar incident happened recently with her violin, and she clearly did not learn from that. So Monday morning, life provided her with another lesson that unfortunately my husband and I sabotaged ourselves. Ugh. 

As a result, Monday’s lesson for me is to stand firm next time in my conviction that I need in an unstated way to allow the girls to fail on projects such as this – with hopes the end result is that they one day become well-rounded, responsible and more accountable individuals.

Maritza Martinez is director of the �鶹ԭ��’s Community Relations department.  She can be reached at Maritza.Martinez@ucf.edu.

In November, I was contacted via phone and email by my credit card company’s fraud department. The customer-service representative informed me that our card number had been compromised and that they were going to close the account immediately and send replacement cards. 

After the representative and I reviewed the most recent 10-15 transactions, which were all legitimate charges, I responded that they (Chase) were overreacting. After all, I had this credit card number for the past 14 years. I had even committed all 16 digits to memory and couldn’t imagine our account ending in anything other than 4884. Yes, I guess I had some kind of sentimental attachment to it, but there also were all the automatic payments that were associated with it.

I assured the representative that my account was fine and that there was no need to overreact by closing it – but to no avail. At the conclusion of our phone conversation, she announced the account was closed and new cards were on their way. Two days later, with no fanfare, confetti, or extra rewards points, our new cards arrived.

That was the end of that. 

My husband and I are meticulous about the disposal of our financial statements and all other sensitive information. We are disciplined about our online purchases. We only purchase from reputable websites such as Amazon and the like, and use our credit card at well-established and well-safeguarded brick-and-mortar retail stores (or so we thought). So I was more than peeved by all this to-do over nothing. 

Then a few days after this we learned of the Target security breach involving a malicious malware that affected all 1,800 Target stores and compromised an estimated 40 million credit cards – ours included. This news helped put things in perspective: The replacement of our card was necessary and in the grand scheme of things, as it related to us, no permanent harm had been done. Thankfully, our credit card had not been used illegally – we just had to bear the nuisance of updating our vendors for automatic payments and the feeling of our privacy disrupted. 

That’s the way I felt – until January, when I received another phone call and email from our credit card company with the same scenario as before: Our number had been compromised a second time and we were being issued new cards. Oh the joy of having to once again collect vendor information, dial their offices, wait on the queue for a representative, update our information, etc.,  and the unsettling feeling that someone was tampering with our account information.

With this being the second time, I figured we had paid our share of inconveniences and this would be it.

That is, until the first week February, when we were hit again! 

This time around, however, we didn’t even get a phone call but just received new cards in the mail. We had instructions to activate them by March 1 because our old cards would stop working on that date. 

The whole situation seems like it has become a joke: In less than four months we were issued three different replacement cards – after using our first card for 14 years without a problem. I no longer offered lengthy explanations to vendors, but merely stated that I was calling to update our credit card information.

Now it seems that combing through our credit card’s daily transactions and comparing notes with my husband has become a necessary staple of our dinner conversations. How unfair and bothersome this has become.

I’m not sure that our household could commit to functioning without a credit card, but there are higher-tech ways for retailers to keep our information safer – such as using imbedded chips instead of magnetic strips, like much of the rest of the world – and they better start doing so if they want to keep us and others as patrons. If the compromising of 40 million cards isn’t enough to expedite swift change in security measures, how many cards does it take?

I just hope I don’t have to activate another new card before I go out for dinner.  

Maritza Martinez is director of the �鶹ԭ��’s Community Relations department.  She can be reached at Maritza.Martinez@ucf.edu.

During this time of the year I am often reminded of the poem “The Dash” by Linda Ellis. The poem refers to the dates on a person’s tombstone, the birth year and year of death, separated by a dash. The poem makes the point that the dash represents what you did with your life from the time you were born until your death. 

Were you a loving parent? An accomplished researcher? Community volunteer? Respectful child? Maybe you were the person who thought right before passing: “I hope I activated my autoreply.” Or maybe you were the person who during that last minute thought, “Wow. I lived my life intentionally and I invested my time wisely.”

I propose that instead of a dash, this year and every year after we substitute the dash with an exclamation point to symbolize a life lived purposely and intentionally, with excitement and gusto!

How should we achieve this goal? Perhaps by focusing on a short list of activities or things that we may want to try, and setting a time period to complete them to make sure we hold ourselves accountable. Or perhaps make spending time with family and friends a higher priority?

What about setting boundaries between ourselves and our technological habits, such as our cell phones? That way, when we are in a meeting, catching up with a friend at a café, or having dinner with our family, we can really be in the moment, instead of missing the interaction because we are consumed by “capturing” the moment  on camera so that we can enjoy it – later.

After all, it’s not about the destination, but the journey – the everyday; the little things that in retrospect will become the big things, or the fond memories we will retreat to during challenging times.

Or what about making it a goal this year to do something great, something we can all do: volunteer. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace.”

Volunteering or serving to improve one’s community is something we can all do. For some reason, people make volunteering seem like too much of a burden. They become overwhelmed by the thought of becoming involved, because they say they don’t have time, don’t know where to begin, or don’t consider themselves equipped with a skill unique enough to be appreciated or in demand.  However, there are many ways in which you can exercise good citizenship and involvement that will probably lead to a happier, more exclamation-centric life – over the simple dash. 

I invite you to explore mentoring a student or a younger professional, serving on a committee at your local YMCA or chamber of commerce, or reaching out to one of the many nonprofits in your area. Whether you are passionate about the arts, the wellbeing of animals, making connections on behalf of the local Boys & Girls Clubs, or lending your expertise through a community advisory board, there’s an organization or an individual you can positively impact, with little or no financial outlay required.

And the best part is that, more times than not, you will derive just as many benefits than the entity or organization by way of receiving personal fulfillment and a greater sense of community. 

So this year, join the exclamation point movement and make it your best year yet!

Maritza Martinez is director of the �鶹ԭ��’s Community Relations department. She can be reached at Maritza.Martinez@ucf.edu.