This column first appeared in 2008, but it was so well received I decided to re-post it. Happy Thanksgiving!
Our family is large and loud and lively. Our family tree has branches in Jacksonville, Ocala and Orlando, as well as Fort Lauderdale, so we don’t all get together as often as we used to but Thanksgiving is the exception.
Thanksgiving moved to our house almost 20 years ago after my mother stopped cooking and my two sisters stopped trying. Since it is impossible for my partner and me to host a dinner party without a disaster, the disasters themselves have become part of family lore.
The bird is always trouble. There was the Thanksgiving that I cooked it in a foil roaster but neglected to see the instruction that said “Support roaster from the bottom.” I took the bird from the oven and it promptly fell through the pan onto the floor. After a horrified moment my partner and I scooped it up, brushed off the cat hair and started to carve it. No one died.
Although I make the turkey family tradition mandates that everyone brings their specialty dish to the table. It was in 1974 that my middle sister, as a young bride, first brought her corn pudding to dinner. It was not very good but we all smacked our lips and asked for seconds and it has been a fixture at the table ever since.
We range in age from matriarch to infant and before dinner there is a flurry of activity. The young parents worry that their toddlers will make noise, or make a mess, but the old folks are blessedly hard of hearing and the middle-aged group doesn’t care as long as the wine keeps flowing. Admittedly, the cats are not pleased but they retreat under the bed and are not really missed.
All large families have eccentric relatives who bring their quirks to the holiday. For years my brother-in-law would sneak into the kitchen with a meat thermometer to test the turkey before I carved it. He never quite got over the Thanksgiving of 1996 when I served the equivalent of “turkey tartar.”
In some ways we are a traditional group. We join hands and say grace before the meal and Mom, in a voice that is stronger than she is, always remembers those who are not at the table anymore. As she does, some squeeze their eyes tightly while others roll their eyes, impatient to get to the stuffing. In other ways we are less traditional, and as we join hands our family becomes a mix of gay and straight, black and white, Jew, Baptist, Catholic and “other.” My younger brother (McCain) and my older sister (Obama) will exchange pointed words over the mashed potatoes and forget them entirely before the pumpkin pie is served.
And therein lies the beauty of this holiday. Although we ostensibly gather for a great meal, the meal is often not that great. We’ve had lumpy potatoes and undercooked turkey, pie crusts that have refused to brown and stuffing that burnt for no apparent reason. We’ve had cats that coughed up a hairball just as dinner was served and babies who projectile vomited during dessert. We had elderly Aunt Rose laugh so hard she dropped her false teeth on the table.
I think you can see the heart of a family by looking at its Thanksgiving table. We never ate mashed turnips until my partner joined the family, but now I can’t imagine a Thanksgiving without either one of them. For years my brother’s wife brought her sweet potato casserole to the dinner while my sister’s husband brought cheesecake. Tragically, this year their will be no sweet potatoes and no cheesecake; they both passed away within ten days of each other last December, after one very long and one horribly short battle with cancer.
Families are built for survival. We’ve survived corn pudding and raw turkey as well as elections and cancer. No one can bear to make sweet potato casserole this year but my niece will try a new recipe in the place of her mother’s specialty because our Thanksgiving traditions are always changing but at their core they are stable. Just like our family itself.