Thanksgiving won't be the same this year – but there’s plenty to be thankful for
Ilove Thanksgiving. Not the Thanksgiving of American myth, where benevolent pilgrims revel in the harvest with their good friends the Natives, whom they would never think of enslaving or massacring – not that insidious lie – but the Thanksgiving of my own making, the one that has become a tradition for me and my daughter and our found family. And I wonder how it will feel, this year, to not be able to gather and celebrate together.
I started hosting Thanksgiving dinner about 12 years ago. That was when my mother and stepfather started spending their winters in Florida and gently let us know that they would no longer be having Thanksgiving for our entire family at their home in New Hampshire. What? No more waking up in the morning to seeing my endearingly agitated mother, still in her bathrobe, basting the big bird that was already in the oven, sending waves of intoxicating turkey smell throughout the house? No more talking and drinking all day with my brothers or sailing down the hill on plastic sleds, all of us winding up in a laughing tumble in the snow that used to reliably fall, before global warming made the weather much more unpredictable?
Life is unpredictable; that’s one of its great pleasures and perils. People find jobs, move away, get married and have kids, have fights that seem to leave relationships beyond repair … But no matter what was happening in our family, there was always Thanksgiving, when we would reconnect, and if necessary, mend. Everybody seemed to know that this was our yearly chance to do it. The biggest fights we ever had on those holidays were over who should get the second drumstick, and was that really a valid word in Scrabble? “‘Plew’? Come on!” “Haha, look it up!”
The first year my parents hosted a smaller version of Thanksgiving in Florida, I couldn’t make it. I didn’t want to have to tell them I couldn’t afford the trip, or that I had become separated from my then husband. I didn’t want to face all the uncomfortable questions families seem to feel they have a right to ask. But what was I going to do about Thanksgiving dinner? I didn’t want to let down my daughter, then eight years old, by not having some kind of festive gathering; I also didn’t know if I was up to the job. I had never cooked a turkey!
But parental guilt is a great motivator. And so it was that I lugged a 20lb bird home from the supermarket and managed – more nervous than my mother had ever been in this grand undertaking – to prepare my first Thanksgiving spread. I invited a handful of people, stray cats from the neighborhood who hadn’t made other plans. Miraculously, nothing went wrong. It all turned out delicious, and lovely. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between me and Thanksgiving hosting.
I love getting up early when everyone is still sleeping to start preparing the feast. I love using all the little tricks that I learned from my mother and grandmother: a cheesecloth draped lightly over the turkey for the first three hours to keep it moist; a spicy apricot puree whipped into the sweet potatoes to make them mouth-watering; a splash of bourbon in the pecan pie. I usually ask people to come around 2, so they can talk and drink while I’m finishing cooking the food, which I serve around 4. I always make a playlist beforehand (the keys to any good party: good music, good food and lots of wine) which starts out jazzy (Benny Goodman, Ellla Fitzgerald) and ends up danceable (Lizzo, Prince, Britney).
Yes, we dance. One year my friends Amy and Austin did a tongue-in-cheek duet to Scream and Shout that belonged on Drunk Dancing with the Stars. We all clapped and cheered. Amy owns a restaurant and Austin is an artist; she is of Japanese heritage, and he is gay. Over the years, we’ve been graced with the presence of Iranian filmmakers, African-American musicians and writers, a Japanese restaurateur, a Turkish café owner, a Pakistani journalist, an Indian web designer, a transgender singer, and more. It’s my New York family. As the evening winds down, we all collapse on the couch and watch a funny movie. First Wives Club, anyone?
But now, with Covid raging across the US, Thanksgiving gatherings like ours are cancelled. And so what will we do, my daughter and I, without all these people, without this warm party, this fun? I know we’re going to be a little sad, but we’ll have each other, and we’ll be thankful for that. We’ll be thankful we have food and shelter, and that a vaccine is on the way. We’ll make dinner and Zoom with family and friends. And we’ll hope that, by this time next year, we can all be together again.