Thanksgiving traditions

Getting ready for Thanksgiving

Our homeschooling co-op will be discussing Thanksgiving traditions tomorrow, so I wrote this little account to share.  Susan, you asked recently how co-op was going, and it’s really going fine.  I’ve not been nearly as involved this year as last, so it’s just been a nice way to get out of ourselves a bit each week.  

Anyway, here’s our Thanksgiving story:

Where Thanksgiving celebrations are concerned, our family fits somewhere in the middle.  On the one hand, we usually eat our meal as a small family of three, so there’s inherently not as much organizing required as there is fixing an elaborate meal for thirty.  With three people, there’s not a lot of pomp, either.  But we do have our traditions, and the balance that we’ve struck makes Thanksgiving my favorite holiday.  

I might as well just go ahead and say that my husband and daughter are Alden descendants, because it’s pretty central to our feeling for the holiday.  I know that some Southerners put way too much emphasis on genealogy, as though having the right ancestors (whichever group you consider “right”) somehow almost makes you a better person.  But that’s not the case with our family.  We just find it a fun personal connection to history.  

Before we moved to New York, my mother-in-law would invite all her siblings and their children to meet at her home for Thanksgiving, a group that could swell to more than thirty!  She has quite a sense of fun and tradition and loves being a hostess, so we always enjoyed these gatherings.  There was always an acknowledgment of genuine Christian piety, and sometimes we went so far as to read family letters or have someone recite a poem.  And on thirty-five acres in Georgia, after eating a traditional turkey dinner, it’s warm enough so that you can take your ten or more teen and twenty-something cousins and form a pretty formidable football team.  And before I met Bob, he used to run the Atlanta Marathon on Thanksgiving Day.  I only mention this because for years afterwards he had a Pavlovian reaction and insisted on eating roast poultry after every marathon, no matter what the date.  He takes naturally to traditions.   

Over the years of C.Z.’s childhood in New York, even without the huge gatherings, we’ve made efforts to form our own traditions, and had fun doing so.  We attended the Macy’s balloon blow-up several times (this is fun even if you're not a big licensed character fan), and one year Bob and C.Z. even tried out the parade itself.  Historically speaking, we started out, when C.Z. was young, reading Sarah Morton’s Day and Tapenum’s Day, which are accurate picture books about children at Plimoth Plantation.  As C.Z. got older, we delved into other historical fiction that touched on the Plymouth settlement.   And more recently we've read the account of the original Thanksgiving in Mourt’s Relation, and selections from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.  

At one point, my mother-in-law had made a cute pilgrim costume for one of Bob’s cousins, and somehow C.Z. ended up with it.  We knew it was more like the stereotyped costumes you see in ads than what a young pilgrim girl would have actually worn, but that didn’t matter.  C.Z. wore it for years’ worth of dress up, and even traipsed around the Upper East Side with it one day when she went to a family history presentation for a homeschool group. (Family history day in New York City is absolutely fascinating, by the way.)  

Years later, we even went to Plimoth Plantation itself--though in April, not November.  I absolutely recommend it, and that you study up first, because what you get out of it depends on what you say to the people who work there.  Bob enjoyed looking for that naughty Billington boy so he could cross-examine him about almost blowing up the Mayflower. He finally found him in a tree, and not surprisingly, the young man was evasive. He was also bemused to find that great-grandma Priscilla Mullins had his red hair!

Our Thanksgiving menu has varied over the years.  One year we found a genealogy magazine with all kinds of recipes for the original foods that would have been eaten by the Plymouth settlers, and tried out some hasty pudding.  We didn’t like it so much that we ever made it again, though.  Mostly we just like good food from whatever era!  Since we’re such a small family, we’ve roasted turkey breasts instead of whole turkeys, or eaten whole chickens instead, but lately we’ve been able to order local, free-range turkeys that are small enough to eat up within a reasonable time.  I usually fix a batch of my mom’s cornbread recipe in an iron skillet, and make her dressing from another batch.  I usually make my own stock ahead of time.  We have our preferred dishes, like corn pudding, a leafy green vegetable, potatoes or sweet potatoes, and a pie with real-and-not-too-sweet whipped cream.  Lately I’ve been working my CSA produce into the meal, which makes everything very seasonally appropriate.  And Bob and I like to share a bottle of pinot noir.  

But please don’t think we’re food snobs!  The one constant, through all our years and years of Thanksgivings, has been at least one can of very fake, very smooth, very sweet jellied cranberry.  No whole berries, please.  It has to wiggle, and you have to be able to see the imprinted lines from the can!  I’m not sure why this is, but perhaps it’s an acknowledgment that traditions don’t necessarily have to be serious. 

My mom's cornbread in the oven

Thanksgiving, in some ways, has become for our family the simple holiday that Christmas isn’t. I have not spent a Christmas at home since, oh, 1976?  Sometimes our family would really like to try staying home for Christmas, but we consider getting together with our larger families to be important, too, and after all, we’re the ones who moved away.  Our Christmases tend to be hectic and the gifts conventional, because there are so many people to please, and so many schedules to coordinate.  But Thanksgiving is another matter.  We enjoy a few days off, without travel.  We eat what we want without having to fix thirty people’s favorite dishes or argue over whose recipe to use; C.Z. can seriously help with the cooking and we don’t feel like interlopers in someone else’s kitchen; we can relish the meaning of the holiday without alienating anyone or even getting distracted by TV; and we can enjoy some restful days off from our usual activities.  

And on the New York side, there are no Thanksgiving women’s parties to coordinate, or Thanksgiving orchestra concerts and recitals to attend like there are at Christmas.  And we don’t go shopping!  And it’s a lovely sort of winter squash and fall leaves holiday, after which we try really hard to celebrate advent, but are not always entirely successful.  I’m at peace with Christmas as a compromise between three generations that travel to Georgia yearly and try to split the time fairly, but Thanksgiving is for our little family.  

All this individualism might almost make me sound like we don’t like to be hospitable, whereas the truth is more that my husband doesn’t get much time off, and travels most of the time when he does, so that’s why we usually eat with just the three of us. To strike a balance between having a strictly family event and being hospitable, though, sometimes we invite someone over for dessert, or go to someone else’s home for dessert.  And this year, for the second time (we also once shared a first American Thanksgiving with an Australian family), we’re actually going to try sharing the whole meal with a neighbor family.  It was the wives’ idea, of course, but we’re thinking that we can make it low key enough, and that we agree on enough of the basics, so that it will be fun for all. 

So, as far as I’m concerned, there’s a lot to be thankful for in Thanksgiving.  What’s your  Thanksgiving like?