Letter from America
Mayhem – then perfect peace. That’s the promise of Thanksgiving
Four months after I arrived in New York in 1998, I asked an English friend, a writer for a fashion magazine, about Thanksgiving.
‘Not a big deal,’ she told me. ‘It’s an afternoon. A day. Then back to work.’
I’ve learned since: never trust a thin person on the subject of food. I spent that first Thanksgiving sitting on the roof of my apartment building in the West Village after an early snowfall, bundled up and reading Willie Morris’s memoir of life in New York and Mississippi, North Toward Home. It’s a great book, but it wasn’t turkey.
A couple of years later, I had my first real Thanksgiving. November 2000. In June, I’d met the woman who would eventually become my wife. She invited me for Thanksgiving at her cousin Jocelyn’s. I had spent most of the month down in Florida, reporting on the recounts after the George Bush/al Gore election. I’d had my fill of ‘hanging chads’, the bits of paper which the elderly of Miami hadn’t fully punched out of their voting cards, leaving their votes in doubt.
I flew back that afternoon from Miami and showed up at Jocelyn’s house in the early evening. She was a grown-up Honoria Glossop, what PG Wodehouse would have called a ‘sporty girl’. Big-boned, big-haired and with a voice to summon hounds across miles of New Jersey hunt country, or knock an errant taxi driver back into his box. She was also an avid Europhile.
As I came through the front door, she greeted me from the top of the stairs.
‘In your honour, we have prepared the official pudding of England!’ I must have looked puzzled. ‘Now, you do know what the official pudding of England is?’ she bellowed.
‘Spotted dick?’ I said weakly, hanging up my coat. ‘No! Try again!’ ‘Trifle?’
‘No. Sticky toffee pudding! The official pudding of England is sticky toffee pudding!’
Well, who was I to quibble? The table in her wood-panelled room was groaning with food. A glistening turkey circled by a dozen side dishes, creamed potatoes, mashed yams, fried oysters, crunchy sprouts and bowls of blood-red cranberry sauce.
The guests were a random bunch, her sons and their girlfriends, relatives distant and not so, and a few smooth-cheeked men from auction houses whom Jocelyn liked to keep circling around a couple of decent paintings she’d inherited. The lights were dim and the whole room bathed in a golden orange, like sitting inside a pumpkin.
There were no prayers to say, no presents to open and nothing else to do for the rest of the day. Just eat, drink and wallow in the conversational gurgle. And such is the simple glory of the day. A come one, come all, feast-and-depart moment as autumn turns to winter. A celebration with no strings attached.
The origins of the day and the meal go back to the Pilgrims who landed near Plymouth Rock. The story goes that, in 1621, the Pilgrims were facing their first winter. As temperatures dropped on the wind-lashed New England coast, the Pilgrims were approached by local Indians who offered to cheer them up with a feast of lobsters, clams, corn, greens, dried fruits and wild turkey.
In 1789, George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving on Thursday, 26th November. But it wasn’t until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln ordained that Thanksgiving should be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, that the holiday took hold.
In a secular country, Thanksgiving is the holiday that binds. The airports heave; the roads are clogged as people race home for this one day. There is no religion to confine or exclude one group from another. Families and friends mosh in together. And it’s a duty to find out who is alone and invite them along.
John Hughes nailed the spirit of the season in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Steve Martin is an ad exec trying to get home, stuck with a curtain-rod salesman, John Candy. Their journey is a series of disasters. Martin is driven mad by Candy’s good cheer – ‘We’ll have more luck playing pick-up sticks with our butt-cheeks than we will getting a flight out of here.’ Martin realises Candy is a widower with nowhere to go, and invites him home for the family meal.
It’s an American story of challenge, distance and strangers, caught in the maw of capitalism, saved by a sentimental ending. A nation of road warriors comes home and lays down its arms.
Donald Trump will have his first experience of pardoning a turkey. Farmers have been sending turkeys to the White House for a long time, but it was George HW Bush who first joked he was issuing his turkey a ‘Presidential pardon’. Since then, it has become an annual gimmick.
It’s a strange thing to say about a day of feasting. But, given the day after is Black Friday – the busiest shopping day of the year, when people run each other down for flat screens, and Christmas is soon to follow – Thanksgiving is a rest. There’s nothing to buy, nothing to give. Just a few hours while the pulverising noise stops.
‘A nation of road warriors comes home and lays down its arms’