More on the Thanksgiving week series.

I attended a brainstorming meeting today with several reporters to come up with some ideas and map out several days’ worth of stories to run during the holiday week. The reporters were David Hench, Beth Quimby, Josie Huang, Ray Routhier and Tom Bell.

We decided to reframe the series. Instead of focusing on Thanksgiving travel, we renamed it “Thanksgiving Journeys.” This focus gives us a whole new batch of story themes to pursue because the word journey can be interpreted both literally, as in holiday travel, and figuratively, as in a person’s emotional journey.

From there we narrowed our topics to several specific story themes, and the reporters are looking for people and anecdotes to write about as part of those stories.

The stories so far are:

1. An immigrant’s journey to Maine and the blending of their traditional holidays with American celebrations like Thanksgiving.

2. One family’s travel adventure trying to get there from here at Thanksgiving.

3. A soldier who spent last Thanksgiving in a war zone but is home for this year’s celebration.

4. College freshmen making their first trip home and trying to reconnect with friends.

5. Family members for whom this will be the first Thanksgiving that they’ve been reunited with a sibling or loved one.

6. Someone recently diagnosed with a debilitating illness such as Alzheimer’s, for whom this Thanksgiving marks the start of a journey into the unknown.

We’re also soliciting reader suggestions, and their own stories of Thanksgiving Journeys. We may publish several of these accounts from readers, in their own words. You can e-mail those to me directly at arussell@pressherald.com.

We may also add a first-person story from one of our staff reporters, but that hasn’t been nailed down yet.

As always, let me know your thoughts.

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