Rethinking the holidays
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 along with a turkey, 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.”
Since 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, 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, in
door 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.”
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 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 Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.
She points to recent New York Times wedding announcements as an exam
ple 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 most of significance for them — and with no homogeneity.”
We can bring that same creativity to Thanksgiving and other holidays this year.
“Rituals make the ordinary extraordinary,” says Jodi Eichler-Levine, a professor of religion studies at Lehigh University. “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.