what may be my favorite holiday
Thanksgiving, especially in the context of Thanksgiving break, manages to include everything I like about a celebration: spending a day with extended family, eating way too much, the collective watching of sports (Broncos - Chiefs, in this case), and cooking. These activities generally seem to be so rare in contemporary American society (except the overeating one) that circling a day on the calendar and giving everyone the day off work seems an appropriate amount of recognition that these things are, in fact, important.
This year, as my family has done with few exceptions for as long as I can remember, we're having some extended family over to our house for the holiday. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the same town as my auntie and uncle who have two kids, one the same age I am, so most holiday occasions easily became family ones; when I was younger, I had a great-aunt and great-uncle who also lived nearby, and for a few years an aunt and uncle on my dad's side lived in Telluride, in southwest Colorado. We've always had to put the extra leaves in the dining room table to accommodate everyone, and the dinners have provided, in a sense, a rough timeline of major family events (people moving here or there, bringing a girlfriend who they later married, etc.). Also, since the adults in my family are infrequent drinkers, Thanksgiving is one day that dependably features "family secret time," always a highlight and indeed the subject of anecdotes and gossip for the balance of the year.
This conflation of Thanksgiving and family is so important to me, in fact, that last year, I seriously considered flying back from Budapest to Boston for Thanksgiving to spend it with the entirety of my mom's side--I was the only one of thirty-odd people not to make it--although in the end the vacation wasn't quite long enough for the trip to make sense. That's one of the draws about Thanksgiving, though; despite being one of the most important family-gathering days during the course of the year, the time off work is relatively brief, forcing everyone to criss-cross the country over the span of a couple days right beforehand. I flew home Tuesday evening on a not-quite-full flight, and the trip was made that much more enjoyable because everyone on the plane was happy.
As far as the meal itself goes, I've noticed that I have by now been conditioned to have my strongest appetite when eating "Thanksgiving food." Even when turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and the like are served as a normal dinner or at the dining hall, I find myself going back for a second plate. I remember one year, when I was in middle school or so, beating everyone at the table by consuming six full plates of food. I like to think that my appetite shines when with a large group at dim sum, but I honestly think I eat more at Thanksgiving, somehow repressing my feeling of satiation until everyone else is clearly ready for dessert.
The sports argument is tied to the return home for Thanksgiving that I've pulled off twice now in college and will probably end up doing intermittently for the foreseeable future. Not only do I believe in professional sports as one of the only spaces in which people with nothing else particularly in common can sit and develop a camaraderie, but it's also really difficult to get Denver sports in LA. I miss them. I feel like I'm realizing that many of the things I find irreplaceable about my hometown have to do with the displacement of community identity onto our Broncos, Nuggets, and Avs. Tonight, I definitely watched my first nuggets game of the year, and I now have all sorts of new conversation fodder to mention in the next 4000 conversations I have about the nba this year; I may have even convinced the fam to go to the game on Friday night. Although dinners out (tonight, Saturday) and the art museum's new wing (Friday morning) and the new Lightrail line (also Friday morning) and general errands (all week) are a good way to get back into the feel of being in Denver, there's something very satisfyingly concrete about emotional investment in a bunch of men running around with "DENVER" written on their jerseys.
Finally, the cooking. I really enjoy it, and over the past summer or two I've started cooking dinner while my parents are at work. Thanksgiving causes the kitchen to transcend its role as a room in which food is prepared and become a stress-filled nerve center for an entire social gathering. Although I'm normally welcome to help out in the kitchen, Thanksgiving reduces my dad and I to the most menial sorts of labor, running to the back pantry, getting a specific dish down from a high cabinet, or polishing the silver, while my mom (sometimes with an aunt) does the work of five or more people. It's kind of exciting to watch, but I could never stop long enough to enjoy the moment before I was yelled at for not getting started on ironing the tablecloth. This year marks a paradigm shift: we've finally given up on our oven, purchased from Sears in the early 1980s, deeming it no longer fit to serve as the bottleneck through which all the most important parts of the meal had to pass. Instead, we found a gourmet grocery store in the south suburbs and are experimenting with *fried turkey*. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am. As well, because the cooking burden has been shifted elsewhere, I got some oven time this afternoon to try my hand at the cranberry sauce recipe we made a couple times in Budapest. Although we didn't go all-out last year and try to make turkey or pie, we found that the asian/specialty foods store in the basement of Budapest's main market carried bagged cranberries; in fact, cranberries identical in packaging to the ones I used today. Say what you will about the horrors of globalized agriculture and frozen produce and whatnot, those cranberries were a godsend last year, and I can only hope my rendition does the dish justice. In the meantime, I hope to get close to the remaining cooking we're doing this year and figure out casserole, one of those things I think we inherited from Scandinavian (or Scandinavian-American) tradition and now dutifully apply to at least two or three of our Thanksgiving sides. It is, after all, a day that's supposed to be about history, too.
This year, as my family has done with few exceptions for as long as I can remember, we're having some extended family over to our house for the holiday. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the same town as my auntie and uncle who have two kids, one the same age I am, so most holiday occasions easily became family ones; when I was younger, I had a great-aunt and great-uncle who also lived nearby, and for a few years an aunt and uncle on my dad's side lived in Telluride, in southwest Colorado. We've always had to put the extra leaves in the dining room table to accommodate everyone, and the dinners have provided, in a sense, a rough timeline of major family events (people moving here or there, bringing a girlfriend who they later married, etc.). Also, since the adults in my family are infrequent drinkers, Thanksgiving is one day that dependably features "family secret time," always a highlight and indeed the subject of anecdotes and gossip for the balance of the year.
This conflation of Thanksgiving and family is so important to me, in fact, that last year, I seriously considered flying back from Budapest to Boston for Thanksgiving to spend it with the entirety of my mom's side--I was the only one of thirty-odd people not to make it--although in the end the vacation wasn't quite long enough for the trip to make sense. That's one of the draws about Thanksgiving, though; despite being one of the most important family-gathering days during the course of the year, the time off work is relatively brief, forcing everyone to criss-cross the country over the span of a couple days right beforehand. I flew home Tuesday evening on a not-quite-full flight, and the trip was made that much more enjoyable because everyone on the plane was happy.
As far as the meal itself goes, I've noticed that I have by now been conditioned to have my strongest appetite when eating "Thanksgiving food." Even when turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and the like are served as a normal dinner or at the dining hall, I find myself going back for a second plate. I remember one year, when I was in middle school or so, beating everyone at the table by consuming six full plates of food. I like to think that my appetite shines when with a large group at dim sum, but I honestly think I eat more at Thanksgiving, somehow repressing my feeling of satiation until everyone else is clearly ready for dessert.
The sports argument is tied to the return home for Thanksgiving that I've pulled off twice now in college and will probably end up doing intermittently for the foreseeable future. Not only do I believe in professional sports as one of the only spaces in which people with nothing else particularly in common can sit and develop a camaraderie, but it's also really difficult to get Denver sports in LA. I miss them. I feel like I'm realizing that many of the things I find irreplaceable about my hometown have to do with the displacement of community identity onto our Broncos, Nuggets, and Avs. Tonight, I definitely watched my first nuggets game of the year, and I now have all sorts of new conversation fodder to mention in the next 4000 conversations I have about the nba this year; I may have even convinced the fam to go to the game on Friday night. Although dinners out (tonight, Saturday) and the art museum's new wing (Friday morning) and the new Lightrail line (also Friday morning) and general errands (all week) are a good way to get back into the feel of being in Denver, there's something very satisfyingly concrete about emotional investment in a bunch of men running around with "DENVER" written on their jerseys.
Finally, the cooking. I really enjoy it, and over the past summer or two I've started cooking dinner while my parents are at work. Thanksgiving causes the kitchen to transcend its role as a room in which food is prepared and become a stress-filled nerve center for an entire social gathering. Although I'm normally welcome to help out in the kitchen, Thanksgiving reduces my dad and I to the most menial sorts of labor, running to the back pantry, getting a specific dish down from a high cabinet, or polishing the silver, while my mom (sometimes with an aunt) does the work of five or more people. It's kind of exciting to watch, but I could never stop long enough to enjoy the moment before I was yelled at for not getting started on ironing the tablecloth. This year marks a paradigm shift: we've finally given up on our oven, purchased from Sears in the early 1980s, deeming it no longer fit to serve as the bottleneck through which all the most important parts of the meal had to pass. Instead, we found a gourmet grocery store in the south suburbs and are experimenting with *fried turkey*. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am. As well, because the cooking burden has been shifted elsewhere, I got some oven time this afternoon to try my hand at the cranberry sauce recipe we made a couple times in Budapest. Although we didn't go all-out last year and try to make turkey or pie, we found that the asian/specialty foods store in the basement of Budapest's main market carried bagged cranberries; in fact, cranberries identical in packaging to the ones I used today. Say what you will about the horrors of globalized agriculture and frozen produce and whatnot, those cranberries were a godsend last year, and I can only hope my rendition does the dish justice. In the meantime, I hope to get close to the remaining cooking we're doing this year and figure out casserole, one of those things I think we inherited from Scandinavian (or Scandinavian-American) tradition and now dutifully apply to at least two or three of our Thanksgiving sides. It is, after all, a day that's supposed to be about history, too.
posted by sam at
4:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home