Thanksgiving
You don’t have to pretend to enjoy a couple of dry slices of turkey breast to get something out of it. The food is still overrated. Preparing for it is stressful. But death? Death’ll teach you something.
Thanksgiving was just so formal. And my family was not
My mother was a great musician and a terrible cook, aside from spaghetti, fudge and clam dip. (Clam dip: Every kid’s favorite. Or not.) Most of the time this was a fair trade-off, but at Thanksgiving, it meant she required assistance on the cooking front.
I grew up in Virginia, the youngest of five children, and our grandparents lived in town, so we had a full table. So full, in fact, that some years I was relegated to the kids’ table — which consisted of me eating food I didn’t like in the first place while sitting at a portable dishwasher.
Having my siblings return home was fun, of course. Dinner, not so much.
In addition to the turkey, there was dressing, which was OK, and vegetables in various guises with all the flavor and texture cooked right out of them. Country ham was my favorite, when we had it, though that was usually more of a Christmas thing.
It was also the one time we broke out the good china, which resided in a large wooden sideboard the rest of the year. The thought of dropping one of the hideously ugly plates (which, to hear my mom tell it, were so fragile you practically only had to look at them to break them) was terrifying.
It was all so … formal. And if there is one thing my family is not, it’s formal. Loud, boisterous, laugh till you cry, occasionally uncouth? Sure. That’s the best thing about us.
But I always felt like we were playacting at Thanksgiving, like any time someone said the wrong thing a director might yell, “Cut!” and we would have to start the scene again.
One less seat at the Thanksgiving table
The strangest year was my freshman year of college. My father was sick, dying of cancer. He couldn’t even come down for dinner. Toward the end of dinner we helped him down the stairs and he sat for a bit, then went back upstairs
to bed. The next day he went to the hospital and never came home.
If this sounds maudlin, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a laugh riot, either, but we always try to make the most of things. At a party after my dad’s death, one of my brother’s friends came up to my mom and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but this is the best funeral I’ve ever been to.”
It was a weird Thanksgiving, though.
Suddenly Thanksgiving was 2,000 miles away
After college, I moved away and then moved away even farther.
One year my boss in Arizona, feeling pity for me, invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Now that was fun, finally — and I was old enough not to worry about dropping plates. They kept inviting me, then me and my wife and then our kids, as well.
Some years we went back east and had dinner with family. My sister, hyper-organized and fully in charge, hosted huge dinners for all kinds of relatives and friends. It may still have been stressful, but most of the stress was on her. And she seemed to enjoy it.
Thanksgiving became her holiday. There was never a question where it would be held. Her house became the default. These were enormous, legendary
affairs; one year the crowd was so large she used the basement of a nearby church.
I wasn’t there for that one, or many of them.
Then, suddenly, she died. It was the summer of 2022, and while you think about a lot of things when something like that happens, where you’ll have Thanksgiving dinner now that she’s gone isn’t at the top of the list. It rises up there, though, as the months go by.
That fall, no one was really in the mood to have it at her house without her there. So last year we had it at my house. In Arizona, more than 2,000 miles from the usual location.
This was great news for my kids, who love nothing more than sitting around and listening to beer-fueled family stories saturated in self-deprecation, something they typically have to go back east for, but that now was coming to them.
Carrying on the Thanksgiving torch (or carving knife)
Of course, in theory saying: sure, let’s eat here” is fun.
Then it dawns on you at some point that you are all of a sudden upholding a family tradition, the meal around which everyone gets together just once a year. With my sister doing the heavy lifting,
“hey,
we could concentrate on the stories after dinner (and the beer). While she handled the dinner itself.
No longer. Menus were coordinated long-distance. There was a list of some sort made. Turkey, salt-cured country ham, stuffing, all the usual stuff. Plenty of beer. DINNER OUTSIDE, because the weather is nice and all of those people wouldn’t fit inside, anyway.
It was great. And different. There were appropriate toasts, and appropriately heartbreaking ones. There were some tears and a lot of laughter and of course a whole lot of food. Which, other than the country ham, I still didn’t care much about one way or the other. But that was secondary, if that.
What there was, was Thanksgiving. This was where we needed to be, with the people we needed to be with. I hate clichés, but sometimes they become clichés because they’re true. Be thankful for what you have. Be thankful for what you had. One doesn’t work without the other.
And never forget to soak the country ham.
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