Welcome to Thanksgiving week! Let's talk about it during the morning coffee moment.
To readers who live outside the United States, I think this holiday may be a bit of a puzzle. We have an image of warring peoples coming together on this day, back in 1621. Yet over time, we have come to understand that our image is just that -- a wishful thinking about an event that was far more complicated and had more than one troubling aspect to it. We impute a generosity of spirit on all sides to that first Thanksgiving, even as it may have had little of that. Possibly for good reason.
And yet, we can take that image and run with it and let its finest details become part of our celebration. And that's what we do: we create a holiday that at its essence celebrates graciousness and family and coming together in this godawful month when the weather is rarely pretty and daylight hours are short and few between. And we all cook the same meal! Or, mostly the same. Unless you're a vegetarian, you're going to be eating turkey. And cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes and maybe pie. Pumpkin pie. I mean, we may be creative in our recipes, but they're all dancing around the same core ingredients! In our imagination, this is what a fall harvest would have netted those sharing a meal way back when, even though, of course, few of those components were likely to be part of the bounty. With the exception of cranberries which were, in fact, native to North America. Oh and a yes to pumpkin, though definitely not pies, as there were no ovens and no ingredients for a crust.
And yet, our meal reeks of tradition. Isn't it just so strange? And strangely wonderful?
Man oh man, do I love this day!
For years and years I've roasted that bird and worked all day at putting food on the table for my family. This is what you do on Thanksgiving. You cook, you eat together. That's it.
So, are we eating together this year?
No we are not.
My younger girl's family lives in Chicago and though they are excellent at taking precautions and mitigating the spread of the virus and both she and her husband work at home, nonetheless, their child goes to day care and so there is a risk of transmission.
My older girl's family lives a 16 minute drive from the farmette, and my daughter and her husband, too, work from home. But baby sitters were helping with child care and so even though the family maintains strict isolation and safety protocols, there, too, is a risk of transmission. They tried to meet the isolation guidelines (14 days without sitters or any outside contact would put them in the category of safe), but work demands were too great and so our initial plan to meet up on Thanksgiving Day fell through. [On the upside, they are gunning for that 14 day isolation as we speak, and by December, they may have counted off the requisite number of days. That, coupled with testing would allow them to rejoin our bubble and I will be able to jump in once again to care for the kids, giving them a break from sitters, at least for the month of December.]
When you measure the disappointment, I think you'd have to take it from the perspective of the younger members of our multigenerational family. They are all doing Thanksgiving alone, in their nuclear pods, for the first time ever. But for Ed and for me -- well, we've had solo holidays before. My kids have many households to balance during the holidays. In-laws, their dad and his partner -- they all deserve their share of holiday time. And so there have been years when Ed and I would dine alone, ordering Thanksgiving sushi and calling it a day.
How will this year look for us all? It will be super interesting! My girls and I are all roasting turkeys. I'm going back to one of my oldest recipes, my older daughter will be picking up that recipe as well. My younger girl will be repeating a stuffing she and her husband baked here last year and they will be doing a corn recipe that belongs to his family. There will be moving pies: my ex will be dropping off a pie with my younger girl, I'll be dropping off a pie with my older girl. She'll also get my cranberry corn muffins, just because she likes them. We have technology in place so that we can look in on each others cooking efforts. Honestly, from my perspective, it's not as intimate as when they're all here, but I haven't had them all here very often in recent years and this is a heck of a lot more in the spirit of Thanksgiving than sushi with Ed. (A few years back, he and I actually ate at the Japanese restaurant: sole diners, surrounded by the family that runs the establishment, all anxious for us to be done so they could run out and start shopping for bargains.)
And there you have it! A 2020 Thanksgiving. Followed by a distanced masked park meetup with my younger girl a few days later, and a December resumption of the bubble we will be able to create with my older girl's family.
But for now, let's stick with Thanksgiving. What do you do on a Monday of the big cooking holiday? You make sure your pantry has all the essential ingredients. I've been doing lots of grocery washing, sorting, shelving, Our mudroom takes the overflow and I do have to admit it's hard to walk there right now. Too many squashes, onions, potatoes, yams, broths, sprouts, and garlics.
Next? Well, it's important to use any good weather hours for exercise. They aren't a given this week, so in the late afternoon, we squeeze in a hike in our county park.
And it's super important in these days of isolation and more isolation to squeeze in time with friends. I do that as well.
And then we glide straight into a quiet evening. First day of Thanksgiving week is behind us. Tomorrow, two things have to happen. Oh, but wait -- that's tomorrow. For tonight -- I am loving the glow of the candle, the color of our year-round lights on the staircase, the promise of good leftovers for supper and a moment with my sweetie on the couch, picking up some yet unseen episodes of Grand Designs, were real people struggle to construct dream homes in inhospitable surroundings under trying circumstances.
