Thanksgiving 1982
My memories of Thanksgiving from when I was a little girl are of me, my mom, my dad, a turkey, and Ocean Spray cranberry sauce in the can (which is, just so you’re aware, superior to every other cranberry sauce on the face of this planet). Sometimes we combined our celebration with family friends (above; and lol at my grumpy face), and sometimes my grandparents on my dad’s side came to visit from LA or a relative on my mom’s side came to visit from Canada, but we didn’t have any family who lived close to us, so more often than not it was just us hanging out in New York City and eating too many sweet potatoes.
Except, as it turned out, there were more of us than we’d realized.
When I was in high school, my dad got an email from a cousin he hadn’t heard from in decades, and who, we quickly discovered, lived with her husband just a short subway ride away from us. So did her brother, and his wife, and their son and daughter.
And so, at 16 years old, I found myself sitting around a long, long table filled with relatives for the first time in my life, and for those next few years Thanksgiving was all of us. And then I got married, and things changed, as they do, and Thanksgiving became an annual tradition of driving to Ohio, making silly road trip videos and stopping at Quaker Steak ‘n’ Lube for (very) hot wings.
Last year’s Friendsgiving
And now we live in California. Flying to New York City to be with my parents for the holiday is prohibitively expensive; flying to Ohio is just as much so. I’m flying to NYC with Goldie next week (because I can cover the flight with miles and my Canadian aunt whom she’s never met will be there), and all of us are going to Ohio the day after Christmas, so it’s not like we’re going to miss celebrating the holidays with our families, but still: Thanksgiving, this year, will be a little weird. (Last year was weird too, but this year the orphaned East Coast friends with whom we celebrated weirdly are out of town.)
I thought about making a sort of abbreviated dinner – apparently you can make an entire Thanksgiving dinner on two sheet pans, and it’s actually kind of cool – but then I thought: wait. No. We are not doing Thanksgiving halfway in some kind of sad nod to the fact that we don’t get to be with every single person who we’d like to be with. This year, more than any other in recent memory, I think we all need a day of togetherness and love and way too much pie, and so I’m going to do the whole damn thing. And besides: to me, it’s not Thanksgiving without the drama of potentially ruining a very large and expensive bird. And we won’t have to talk about politics! (Obviously we will, because Kendrick and I have stopped being able to talk about anything else, but we won’t have to.)
This year, it’ll just be us, our kids, a turkey, and Ocean Spray cranberry sauce in the can. And you know what I realized while writing this post? That’s exactly how it used to be, way back when.
Maybe it won’t be so weird after all 
.
