Let Thanksgiving Be Thanksgiving

Most every publication in the country has run at least one column or “lifestyle” story this month about how to get along with relatives on Thanksgiving even though they are evil fascists. (To which I’d add, or football fans.)

To most of us, I suspect, the idea of Thanksgiving dinner battle lines being drawn are as alien as, say, bringing a goat to dinner: it’s just not among the possibilities.

But it seems that there is a substantial group of us who live such faithless, angry, empty lives that political disputes motivate them entirely. Politics is all they have. It permeates every aspect of their joyless existence.

Perhaps they enjoy this, just as there are those — I know some — who smoke dope first thing in the morning and keep at it all day, every day. They have no memory of a straight, enjoyable life; in due course they’ll have no memory of anything. Politics, it seems, has the same effect on those who can’t handle the stuff.

I do not propose to cure this affliction. As is noted in many contexts, the first step toward redemption is recognizing the problem, and many people never make it even that far. But in case there are some out there who seek a better way, experience suggests a happy Thanksgiving can be achieved by . . . giving thanks.

This can take many forms but at the most basic level it requires looking around you and being grateful. Even for a minute or two, or as an undercurrent — that “holiday feeling” — throughout the day.

When I was growing up, Thanksgiving began with the only time the television was on all day: the broadcast of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Please note that even in the current retail-oriented holiday season, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, not Macy’s Day.) Then the television was turned off and remained off. As the event became more commercial, the teevee ended up not getting turned on at all. (Though when I worked in New York, at 40th and Broadway and we had a big balcony all around the building at the radio station on the 23rd floor, I did enjoy stepping outside and looking down at the balloons and crowds.)

After the parade, way back when, there would be an abundance of activity. My mom would gather whatever her dinner contribution was — sometimes pies, sometimes the turkey, sometimes something else. Then my sisters and parents and I would walk the nearly 150 feet over flat ground in bracingly chilly weather, to my grandparents’ house next door.

Aunts and uncles and cousins would arrive, each bringing some contribution. It resembled a church social, with a baked dish of canned sweet potatoes and marshmallows (who ever thought that was a good idea?), and lime Jello with carrot slivers or cottage cheese stirred in (same question). Aunt Oma brought her perennial asparagus casserole, made of canned asparagus, mushroom soup, sliced hard-boiled eggs, not sure what else, and topped with potato chips. Thing is, it was really good.

The womenfolk busied themselves in my grandmother’s kitchen. One would make a relish tray or two involving carrot sticks and celery, green olives stuffed with pimento, black olives, some radishes, and tiny, crunchy dark green pickles that tasted as if they had been steeped in aftershave. Colorful. Someone else would cut the turkey, in the kitchen — the Norman Rockwell painting of it being dismembered at the table is warming but impractical. (Also, no one wanted the drumsticks.) The potatoes were mashed; the dressing was retrieved from inside the bird, and the can of cranberry sauce was opened and the contents plopped onto a glass dish more festive than the sauce itself, though the impressions of the ridges around the can were carefully preserved.

The turkey was always delicious, as were the mashed potatoes, dressing (nowadays called “stuffing”), and gravy. The conversation was happy and cheerful, as the old people discussed old friends and family history and anything else that came up. What didn’t come up was either politics or football, though if the weather was nice the kids might after dinner go out in the yard and throw a football around. That is because “dinner” was the midday meal; the evening victuals were “supper.” In honor of the holiday, dinner might be at 1 p.m. or even a luxurious 2 p.m.

The kids would, as was the custom, sit at card tables that I never saw used for any other purpose. The arrangement had almost church-like formality and ritual, so we were all relatively well behaved.

Afterwards, the old folks would have coffee, do the dishes, and so on, while we children played outside or in the basement until we were tired and cranky and someone got hurt though not badly, and the proceedings wound down. My father, who said my mother “stays until the last dog is dead” would walk back to our house and take a nap.

It was a fine gathering, though if it had happened more frequently none of us would have survived for long. Proper holiday feasts are real work.

(Christmas was not as much a food-centered holiday. The cast was the same, but Christmas presents were a distraction, and at my father and German grandmother’s insistence the centerpiece was a goose. In my estimation, then and now, goose is not edible except in time of great privation, and we didn’t have that. Maybe goose is supposed to be a symbol, like the bitter herbs at Passover.)

Those people are gone now, either dead or dispersed. Over the years, elsewhere, I witnessed angry, shouting Thanksgiving dinners, but these were among people for whom all dinners offered those features. They seemed comfortable with it, so it is not my right to butt in. Once, at a radio network (where there are no holidays for those who actually do anything), we had a “worst holiday story” contest. My friend Kevin Gordon told of the Thanksgiving he got done at the radio station and went home where, alone, he discovered the available celebratory meal would be limited to fish sticks and frozen peas. One of the managers spoke of the year (I think it was Christmas but it could have been Thanksgiving, and given the suffering involved it deserves mention either way) he was expecting his beloved fiance to arrive in icy New York from a Florida trip, and how eager he was to be with her for the holiday, and their life ahead. All day long his happiness and excitement grew, as he edited the news copy. Then, just at nightfall, the call came: she was still in Florida. She had found someone she liked better and this is goodbye. (He won the contest. There was no prize.)

In New York, my close friend (and usually my landlord) John DeRosa would invite me for Thanksgiving each year. It was an abundant, delicious, raucous event as you might expect from a family made up of New York Italians and New York Jews, as exquisite a combination as you’ll find anywhere. There was too much food, too much wine, voices growing happily louder as the evening progressed — in short, just right. Also, there was no politics, though politics is John’s passion, and no football.

When I moved here almost 20 years ago it was my good fortune to meet wonderful, funny, friendly people. They took me in, poor eastern stray, and delightful Thanksgiving dinners lasting many hours were an annual event. Matt, a tremendous chef by profession (I think his diploma actually says that, “Tremendous Chef”), would do most of the cooking, people would bring their own exquisite contributions — Kathleen’s desserts were unsurpassed — and we would eat in the enormous living room of Matt’s mother Nelda’s home (which was the upstairs of what a century ago had been a mining company’s company store) at a long table.

Thanks was given. Nelda was a Catholic — in fact, my sponsor when I converted from the wasteland the Episcopal church had become to what would become the wasteland la papa Francis has made of the Roman Church. (The Episcopalians prohibited what William F. Buckley Jr. described as the most beautiful book in the English language, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and His Potato-ness has prohibited Latin, apparently not having heard what happened to the Episcopalians.) Nelda would say a prayer at the beginning of the meal after which the housebroken among us would say “Amen.” Then we’d dive in.

There was lively talk. Sometimes everyone at the long table was participating in one conversation. Sometimes there would be multiple discussions going on among different groups along it’s great length. Often enough that it could be happily anticipated, stories were told of the remarkable Milton, a real local person who had actually lived, whose life seemed to have been choreographed through a collaboration between Dickens and Twain. I believe he had once lived in what was now Nelda’s home, but it had been fumigated and renovated since then.

I didn’t know the politics of many of the people there, even though we all saw each other regularly over the course of the year. Those whose politics I did know had, well, terrible ideas on the subject. So we didn’t discuss politics — Thanksgiving pro tip. (Not discussing football came naturally to us.) The closest I ever saw to a heated argument came when someone uttered the blasphemy that it was theoretically possible that Graeter’s might not be the best ice cream in the world. But even this evolved into happiness as various people offered their own cheerful experiences involving the brand from Cincinnati. (It is also an article of faith in Ohio that chili was invented in Cincinnati, and that our ancient forefathers had it atop spaghetti, the whole thing topped with generic yellow cheese).

It was always a pure joy. It was Thanksgiving for every second. We were happy to be among such people while we were there, and we drove away happy to know such people.

Twenty years is a long time for those who were old to begin with. It’s a long time for all of us, but it passes more quickly and is more noticed in passing the older we get. (As Jorma put it not long ago, “Life is like a roll of toilet paper — the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.”) Nelda fell and broke her hip — she was, I think, 93 — at the beginning of the pandemic. It was the beginning of her terminal decline. Others went separate ways. There are no new Milton stories.

But the memories of all of it are happy ones.

So I can testify that Thanksgiving dinner ought to be a cheerful thing, a time to give thanks but also, as in time long gone, a thing itself worthy of thanks.

It is not a time to scold or seek revenge.

The trick is to leave the politics on the doorstep when you arrive. (It helps if there is a stern matriarch capable of turning the strongest man into a whimpering puppy with a glance, but we’re grownups and should be able to behave ourselves on our own, right?)

And no football. There is nothing more deadly boring than talking about football. That could, however, be just me.

Focus on having a happy, warm, joyous, thankful Thanksgiving.