Although many families have gathered this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, the Marstons have been celebrating a different holiday.

"It's not Thanksgiving," said Mickelle Marston Wyatt. "It's Utah-BYU week. The holiday gets shoved to the side."

To say the patriarch of this clan is a Ute fan would be like calling the ocean deep or Alaska big.

Harold Marston, a Price native, has been a devout Ute football fan since he began attending the University of Utah in 1970. His obsession began quite modestly, but while the father of three girls was raising his family, he began to show signs of his addiction to anything red.

If driving two hours each way to watch the Utes play on Saturdays isn't evidence of his loyalty, how about what he told his oldest daughter when she dated not just a BYU fan, but a boy whose father worked at BYU.

It was short-lived, and while it was heartbreaking for Wyatt way back then, she acknowledges there was never any hope of true romance with the man in Cougar blue.

"His dad bought him a 1987 Nova with a dent in the bumper if he would quit dating me," said Wyatt, whose cell phone number memorializes four of any Utah fan's favorite numbers — 3431.

Her father's response to this teenage angst?

"I told her, 'That tells you what a stupid (idiot) he is,"' Marston said. "'Because I would have bought him a new car not to date you.' And I would have."

All three of his daughters have graduated from the University of Utah, and he and his wife still cook and deliver dinner to Utah's coaches every Sunday. He's been a season-ticket holder since Jim Fassel was the coach and, like a true soldier, when asked his favorite, he says, "I love them all."

The real evidence of Marston's passion is in his family.

"We have no reason to be such big football fans," said Wyatt, who is the oldest of Harold and Emily Marston's three daughters. "None of us are athletic, but it is athletics that brings us together."

The women said their father's Christmas gift to them each year is tickets to the Utes' bowl game.

His daughters laugh about their first bowl-game road trip, in which Marston rented a minivan — without a heater — and drove 13 straight hours with three sleepy teenage daughters to the Copper Bowl in Tucson.

"We left on Christmas Day to drive down," said Genna Marston Gitlin. "We stayed in the same hotel the team did, and you wouldn't think we would like it, but we loved it."