Thanksgiving

These days, we maintain a low-key Thanksgiving tradition.

During my early years, I clung to the notion of the big dinner with all the trimmings. We would invite family and friends around and I’d enjoy trying to explain the holiday to them, but they never really got it, and I can only do my “Creamed Corn” routine so many times. The joke is over, the tradition has worn thin, so there is no compelling reason to even make note of the day. But we still do.

For the past two decades, I’ve satisfied myself with a turkey breast. Originally, this was because a real turkey wouldn’t fit into my oven, but now it’s because I don’t want to eat an entire turkey by myself while my wife tucks into a nut roast. Even so, a decent sized turkey crown will keep me in holiday dinners through Christmas, Boxing Day, and into the New Year, along with a dozen or so sandwiches for those non-holiday lunches. The nut roast, I notice, does not stretch as far.

And the meal itself isn’t anything special. I don’t bother making corn bread anymore, or sourcing creamed corn. There are no candied yams (thank the Lord; I always hated them), no mincemeat pie (don’t’ ask), no ambrosia (Reddi Wip and a can of fruit cocktail), and no vying for the wishbone. Basically, it’s a Sunday dinner on a Thursday, which isn’t even a special Thursday.

This year, as is our habit, we’re just going about our business and getting together in the afternoon to cook a big meal. In the early morning, we’ll be swimming at the leisure centre, as we usually do, then it will be mundane chores and meetings, and, at some point, we’ll retire to the kitchen to make stuffing and try to find a way to cook two large objects that require different temperatures and timings.

Fifteen minutes after the cooking is done, the meal will have been consumed, the dirty dishes piled up for me to wash in the morning, and we’ll be sitting on the sofa watching Canal Boat Diaries on BBC Four.

Not exactly what you’d expect on a major holiday. And this has caused me to ruminate on how Thanksgiving has morphed for me over the years.

My first recollections were of me and my young cousins sitting at the “Little Table” tucked at the end of the big table. It was always lower—just a collapsible card table with a sheet for a tablecloth—and I usually ended up sitting on a wonky kiddie stool they found in the basement. At the big table, were the older kids, my sister among them, along with our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and, occasionally, an ancient, unknown person whose relationship to me was explained, but not understood. And it occurs to me that I have, without realizing it, traversed that table, from the wonky stool to the seat where the mystery Methuselah sits.

Were we to find ourselves at a traditional, family Thanksgiving feast, my wife and I would be in the seats furthest from the “Little Table,” where the children and the aunts and the uncles, and even the grandparents, could surreptitiously stare, whispering to one another: “He’s the one who left for England years ago, and that woman with him is his wife, and she’s a foreigner.”

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Perhaps that’s why we make certain to never visit the US in the final week of November.

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