• Pandemic forces changes in holiday traditions,
Nina Bryant will cook a feast for Thanksgiving this year, as always.
Ms. 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 along with a turkey, Ms. Bryant will make her 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 same week, 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.”
Because she can’t welcome the friends she’d normally invite, she’ll pack ample portions in gift bags with handwritten notes, then place the bags on her stoop for contactless pickup on Thanksgiving Day.
Once mealtime arrives, Ms. Bryant and Ms. Thibodeau both plan to fire up digital devices and connect with loved ones over Zoom. Family and friends will eat together, yet 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 from out of town “out of concern for me and my age.”
Dr. Fauci said he understands the emotional attachment people have to Thanksgiving and holiday gatherings but urged everyone to be careful this year. Evaluate the risks, especially with 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, said Hanna Kim, department chair of anthropology at Adelphi University 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 getting married have in fact drilled down to what is of most significance for them — and with no homogeneity.”
We can bring that same creativity to Thanksgiving and other holidays this year, said Catherine Sanderson, professor of psychology at Amherst College.
“Rituals make the ordinary extraordinary,” said Ms. Sanderson. “A pumpkin pie on a random day in October is just a pumpkin pie. But a pumpkin pie on the fourth Thursday of November is not just pumpkin pie; it’s part of Thanksgiving. Our intentions, coupled with the season, elevate it.”
And that’s true even if the ritual has been moved because of unique circumstances.
Jennifer Fliss will serve dessert in her Seattle driveway under a pop-up tent this Thanksgiving. She already tested out the process by sharing a socially distanced Rosh Hashanah dinner there with another family.
“Traditions are great,” Ms. Fliss said, “but it’s OK if you do something different.”
She’s wondering if this disrupted holiday season will give rise to new traditions. In the future, she said, families might say, “Oh, we started this tradition of eating dessert outside because of that one year we ate it outside.” This crisis, she said, “could be the entryway into something.”
The key this year, Ms. Sanderson said, may be accepting that things needs to evolve — and avoiding comparisons with celebrations from years past. If you try to replicate past holidays exactly, it’s likely this year’s will feel inferior.
But if we can embrace changes, we might really enjoy it. Liz Devitt’s Christmas celebration this year is a prime example.
Ms. Devitt knew outdoor meals in Massachusetts would be easier in September than on Christmas Day, and it seemed wise to get together with her elderly parents before COVID cases likely rise this winter.
So in mid-September, Ms. Devitt locked up her home in St. Louis and made the 20hour trek to Boston. Soon, she was filling Christmas stockings at her mother’s home and admiring sentimental ornaments on a tree at her dad’s house.
Her family has a slew of favorite traditions. They incorporated the ones they could: Along with giving each other piles of scratchoff lottery tickets, “we had the stockings. We had the Christmas cards. We had the Christmas music and the candles,” she said, “and we had our sappy Hallmark Christmas romance movies.”
It wasn’t normal, she said, celebrating Christmas on Sept. 27 with her dad and Oct. 3 with her mom. But it was kind of wonderful.
Bree Carroll, an Air Force spouse, is hoping she’ll have the same sort of different but-wonderful holiday season this year.
Ms. 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, La. — something now unimaginable during the pandemic.
So this year, from her new home at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Ms. 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 them a place to call home,” she said, because they won’t be able to travel to see their own relatives.