Thanksgivings

“The day of our ships arrival at the place assigned ... in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God."  - charter, London Company, 1619

"A day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God." – George Washington proclaiming the first Thanksgiving holiday, 1789

Thanksgiving is a holiday for me that lives more in the historic past than in the recent past or present. It was the first break in the academic year, when we all came home to be together. We would set the dining table that we usually never used; there would be turkey and my sister and I would get the bones, skin and drippings. There would be sweet potatoes with marshmallows or cinnamon sticks, ham and pineapple for my other sister, green beans. There would be soft, pillowy Hachiya persimmons that my parents saved up for us. The next day there would be turkey congee. Along with Christmas, it encapsulated everything I liked best about traditions: rituals that created warmth and memory, centered around family. Years later, Thanksgiving was when Dave met my parents for the first time and when we started dating (memorable also for the year I had the chicken pox).

Somewhere along the line, that sort of nuclear warmth faded. We usually worked through Thanksgivings in residency. My sisters got married and stopped coming home to celebrate. I was in a post-partum haze for three Thanksgivings. The last few years in Virginia, we attended a potluck lunch with church friends which had that sort of festive quality that only lots of food and people crammed into a small rowhouse can have, and Dave enjoyed a bunch of traditional foods he usually didn’t get to eat. Then we’d go to my parents in the evening, when we would be too stuffed to eat much. Neither felt the same as those Thanksgivings past.

Here, it feels like I’m carving out (haha) the holiday anew. I never really can go back to those nuclear Thanksgivings, but now is when I make it our own—and I suppose every family does that at some point. Dave’s family doesn’t really celebrate holidays; they are joining into whatever we create. So I’m slogging through some amount of nostalgia and loneliness to ask myself: what do I want this holiday to mean for our family?

Well, food and atmosphere is important to me—I don’t know if my kids will feel the same, but I like the traditional dishes, the smell of turkey wafting through the house, everyone together as the table is set. And of course that means work (somehow holidays are more magical when someone else is doing all the work for you), so as I’m doing the whole meal, I’m aiming for what I think we’ll all enjoy without tiring myself out too much to enjoy it. We’re doing a turkey, our annual cranberry-sausage-apple stuffing for Dave. I’m trying a fancy mac-and-cheese recipe for Ellie as it may be the only thing she eats and we aren’t at a potluck where someone else is making it. I’m forgoing my usual pumpkin cheesecake in favor of an easier-to-make apple crisp. I’m making more vegetable dishes as I think Dave’s family will appreciate that and it’s healthier anyway.

I think the other element that’s special about this holiday is how we are all given a chance to stop everything else in life, and be intentionally thankful. So we did one activity where I put up a big piece of paper on the wall and we all wrote what we were thankful for. Ellie wrote a long litany of items ranging from pillows to people and asked if she could also write a separate letter decorated with a turkey to put on the wall too. Eric wrote, “I’m thankful for me (my name is Eric)” (okay, and some other stuff, like the cat and his brother). When asked, Elijah said he was thankful for his stuffed animals. When pressed further, his special rock. When asked, Esme said, “I don’t know” and was mostly upset she couldn’t scribble on the paper herself. Dave wrote, his snuffles bear. I wrote, our kids, this house, the weather.

I guess traditions, and holidays, are what we make of them in the end, and here at the beginning of our own holidays, this start is as good as any.