Clintons to Celebrate Typical Thanksgiving : Holiday: It’ll be turkey and all the trimmings for the First Family at Camp David. In annual ritual, President sets a bird free.

President Clinton headed to Camp David on Wednesday to spend his first prolonged visit to the presidential retreat on a holiday sweetened by a recent string of legislative victories.

Only hours after the unexpected passage of legislation that would provide a five-day waiting period for purchasers of handguns, the Clintons departed by helicopter to spend four days with relatives at the western Maryland retreat in the Catoctin Mountains.

It was the family’s first extended use of Camp David, a favorite of recent presidents that has been less attractive to Clinton because it lacks nearby golf courses and because surrounding pine forests aggravate Clinton’s allergies.

The couple has shown a taste for American cuisine in their formal White House dinners and their Thanksgiving meal, too, will be traditionally American: turkey, cornbread, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie.

Clinton said Wednesday that passage of the handgun control bill, named for former White House Press Secretary James S. Brady, who was wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan, would be a “great Thanksgiving present.”

The family had discussed returning to Arkansas for Thanksgiving--for what would have been only their fourth trip to their home state since the inauguration--to see Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, and stepfather, Dick Kelley.

Instead, they decided to bring the Kelleys from their Hot Springs home, along with other relatives. Hillary Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, will be with them, as will Mrs. Clinton’s older brother, Hugh Rodham, and his wife, Maria Arias, and her younger brother, Tony Rodham, and his fiancee, Nicole Boxer, daughter of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

The Clintons’ weekend is likely to include some of their favored holiday pastimes: reading, movie watching, walks and card playing.

Earlier Wednesday, Clinton visited a church in Southwest Washington to help prepare a Thanksgiving meal for the homeless and made the ritual annual pardon of a turkey in the White House Rose Garden. The pardon has been a tradition since 1947, when President Harry S. Truman spared the life of a turkey.

This year, Clinton officially proclaimed that a turkey presented by the National Turkey Foundation would be sent to a Virginia petting zoo rather than slaughtered.

“Somebody pointed out this morning that this may not be the only turkey I’ve had in my Administration but this is one I will certainly set free,” he joked. “It is my first presidential pardon.”

Clinton used the occasion for a quip about his home state. “It’s a little easier because I’ve been around turkeys all my life. . . . I come from a state that grows a lot of turkeys,” he said, noting that Arkansas is the nation’s fourth-largest producer of the birds.

At Covenant Baptist Church, Clinton asked well-off Americans to help the less fortunate and urged better understanding of people in troubled American cities.

Clinton said: “I think it’s important that the people of America know--all the people of America know--that in our cities, where people have many problems, most of the people who live there are God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working people who are doing things like this to help their friends and neighbors and who want things to work better.”