For the past couple of years, I’ve hosted my family for Thanksgiving at my apartment in Dallas. Before that, I’d trek with my in-laws to Oklahoma or visit my own relatives in Louisiana, but I’ve always had some kind of celebration on this most food-oriented of holidays. This year, though, my husband and I are enduring the exciting insanity of moving to a new house, and as such, we’re skipping Thanksgiving.
Initially, I was relieved at the idea of not having to do all that work. My great-grandmother’s cornbread dressing is a perfect food, but it takes two days of hard labor to make it happen, from preparing the double chicken stock to sauteeing the aromatics and baking an enormous roasting pan of the stuff in the oven for an hour or two. That’s just one dish, and I’ve run myself ragged in recent years trying to put together a picture-perfect meal. But this Thanksgiving, I’ll most likely be enjoying some grocery-store-prepared feast or heading out to a restaurant, and I’m kind of in my feelings about it!
I don’t have any deep emotional connection to Thanksgiving beyond the food, really. It wasn’t a dominant holiday in my family growing up — we are Christmas people — and it’s not like I have some specific annual ritual I’ll be missing out on this year other than that cornbread dressing. I know, though, that when turkey day officially arrives, I’m going to feel a little lonely and underwhelmed, almost pining for those political arguments with my relatives and a piece of sweet potato pie. Really, though, what I'm pining for is the routine, the travel, the eating, the conviviality. (That is, of course, assuming that I have any energy to feel anything other than exhaustion after the horrible slog that is packing, moving, and unpacking.)
I’ve already been drumming up ways to mitigate that feeling of emptiness, because I don’t think one of those pre-assembled supermarket meals is going to cut it. In fact, that might make me even more bummed out. Maybe I’ll make one of the easier dishes in my Thanksgiving repertoire, or put out the turkey-shaped snow globe that my late grandmother gave me decades ago. I know I’ll be grasping for some point of connection with my people, but I haven’t put my finger on what that will be exactly. Perhaps making that decision will be easier once my entire life isn’t sitting in a bunch of haphazardly packed boxes, but I’m not totally optimistic I’ll have much more brain power than I do now.
Thanksgiving is already a complicated holiday, from its genocidal origins to those frustrating political conversations, and I’m honestly surprised at how bummed I am to miss it this year. It’s not actually Thanksgiving I’ll miss, but those fleeting moments of nostalgia that come with every bite of dressing or every snarky comment from my mom — for better and for worse, our traditions make us who we are, and I guess it’s not surprising that I’m feeling a little unmoored in not being able to engage in this annual feast.
In the absence of experiencing my own Thanksgiving traditions, I’d love to hear from all of you about how you plan to celebrate. I want to hear all about your grandma’s cranberry sauce recipe, or that time you burned the turkey so badly that you had to order delivery pizza. Tell me of your most awkward family encounters, like that time your cousin brought another cousin’s ex to the dinner and there was a whole fight about it. Let me revel in a bit of secondhand nostalgia, and by all means, please send me all of your grandmothers’ top-secret recipes to try out next year.
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