I posted this on Thanksgiving morning on social media: I made the mashed potatoes this morning, with cream cheese, Parmesan, and more butter than you want to know about. Kathleen made my mother’s corn pudding recipe. The turkey is in the oven and I’ve taken down the smoke detectors. There will be crab cakes and Key lime pie and wine and cursing from the kitchen.
Our daughter the pescatarian was with us, which explains the crab cakes, and the turkey was for Kathleen, who unaccountably likes it,* and for the guests from our day drinking group, who also like it and who were bringing stuffing and crudites in the shape of a turkey on a platter--no photo available--and Spanish wines. (Kathleen had also baked a pumpkin pie for the traditionalists.)
It was always turkey in my childhood in Kentucky. It was turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the only days we ate ceremonially at the cherry drop-leaf dining table in the front room, with scalloped potatoes and scalloped oysters (from cans; I was in my forties before I tasted raw oysters on the half-shell and discovered that they were actually good), and the sweet corn pone that my grandmother baked in a bundt pan.
Thanksgiving and Christmas were the two days that I did not read at the table, having gotten tacit permission to read at the Sunday dinner table to absent myself from whatever criticism or quarrel was likely to erupt. We understand that holiday gatherings of family involve a pressure to appear to celebrate as if one were part of a classically happy American family and the parallel pressure of the lingering resentments that characteristically erupt on these occasions. I recall one family holiday gathering at which my older sister, Georgia, marveled that no one had left the table in mid-meal angry or crying.
In recent years, when Kathleen's parents were living in a retirement community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we invariably went there for holiday dinner. When we arrived, there were always snacks arrayed on the table in the sun room, the best room in the cottage where they were living, and we ate and drank with abandon until dinner was ready. Then we adjourned to the dining room table, already fairly full, for the entire meal and desultory conversation, after which Kathleen's father retired to a football game in the back room. The meal itself was always somehow anticlimactic.
A memory of an idealized gathering lingers, when our children were both here or nearby and on Sunday evenings we had fam din: I made spaghetti with vegetarian tomato sauce and a big salad, and the four of us were together at table. But now the children are no longer available for weekly fam din, and Kathleen and I sometimes just forage.
Despite the days of Thanksgiving food prep and the hours of cleanup for a couple of septuagenarians, we have yet to succumb to the temptation of the restaurant holiday dinner, though we have tried some in the past. It would mean giving up the time of chatting over drinks and snacks in the living room beforehand, and the relaxed, contented chatting after dessert, reluctant to call the day at an end.
Food and drink and family and friends at the holidays are so damn much trouble and so damned exhausting, even when you actually like the people,** that I am not yet ready to give up on them.
* When I was a child, the holiday turkey appeared for days dry in my sandwiches for lunch at school (and the lunch ladies hated me for bringing them) until I completely lost my taste for the bird. Even Kathleen's homemade cranberry relish and the Baltimore tradition of sauerkraut with turkey have not brought me back.
** Kathleen does actually like people.
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