Rethinking the holidays
Traditions, change are on the table
Nina Bryant will cook a feast for Thanksgiving this year, as always.
Bryant works as an executive chef. But in her own family, she’s the one everyone depends on to prepare her grandmother’s recipes, which spark memories at the holidays. So alongwith a turkey, Bryantwillmakeher grandmother’s sweet potato souffle, and fingerling potatoes with tender asparagus.
This time, because of the pandemic, she’ll do it all several days before Thanksgiving, then ship portions from her home in Florida to her family around the country.
That sameweek, Jeannine Thibodeau plans to go all out as well. She’ll bake brownies three days in advance. Then she’ll roast a turkey, along with “about 5 pounds of mashed potatoes and gravy and stuffing and green beans and cranberry sauce.”
Since she can’t welcome the friends she’d normally invite, she’ll packampleportions in gift bagswithhandwritten notes, then place the bags on her stoop for contactless pickup on Thanksgiving Day.
Once mealtime arrives, Bryant and Thibodeaux both plan to fire up digital devices and connect with loved ones over Zoom. Family and friends will eat together, apart, sharing in the communal experience of a holiday meal without being able to ask each other to pass the gravy.
If ever there were a year when people could use the comfort of a big holiday dinner, this is it. Yet in 2020, a joyful, multigenerational meal around a crowded, indoor dinner table is a potentially high-risk activity.
“My Thanksgiving is going to look very different this year,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told CBS Evening News this week. The infectious- disease expert said his children won’t be coming in fromout of town “out of concern for me andmy age.”
Fauci saidheunderstands the emotional attachment people have to Thanksgiving and holiday gatherings, but urged everyone to be careful this year. Evaluate the risks, especiallywith relatives who arrived on airplanes, and protect the elderly and people with underlying conditions.
What does it look like when longstanding holiday traditions can’t happen?
Ritual celebrations have
been with us since the beginning, but there has always been room for improvisation, says Hanna Kim, department chair of anthropology at AdelphiUniversity in Garden City, N.Y.
She points to recent New York Times wedding announcements as an example of how people can rethink traditional celebrations. The announcements “show the range of ways in which those gettingmarried have in fact drilled down to
what is most of significance for them — andwith no homogeneity.”
We can bring that same creativity to Thanksgiving and other holidays this year.
Jennifer Fliss will serve dessert in her Seattle drivewayunderapop-up tent this Thanksgiving. She already tested out the process by sharing a socially distanced RoshHashanah dinner there with another family.
“Traditions are great,” Fliss says. “But it’s OK if you
do something different.”
She’s wondering if this disrupted holiday season will give rise to new traditions. Inthe future, she says, families might say, “Oh, we started this tradition of eating dessert outside because of that one year we ate it outside.” This crisis, she says, “could be the entryway into something.”
History offers plenty of examples of this, EichlerLevine says.
During the era of mass migration from Europe to the United States, people who’d emigrated suddenly had no way to celebrate major holidays with those they’d left behind. So Jewish families began creating elaborate postcards to celebrate Rosh Hashanah.
The key this yearmay be accepting that things need to evolve — and avoiding comparisons with celebrations from years past. If you try to replicate past holidays exactly, it’s likely that this year’s will feel inferior, says Catherine Sanderson, professor of psychology at Amherst College.
Bree Carroll, an Air Force spouse, is hoping she’ll have a different-but-wonderful holiday season this year.
Carroll is an event planner. Last year, she helped Every Warrior Network stage a Thanksgiving feast for 1,000 airmen and their families at a convention center in Shreveport, Louisiana — something now unimaginable during the pandemic.
Sothis year, fromhernew home at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Carroll is organizing families to each share their Thanksgiving holiday with one or two of the single airmen who live on base. It’s the perfect year to “give themaplace to call home,” she says, because theywon’t beable to travel to see their own relatives.