Growing up, Thanksgiving was definitely my mother's holiday. Her birthday is November 27th, so often the holiday would fall on or right near her birthday.
My mother is an incredibly skilled cook: in variety, flavor, creativity, and sheer volume. It's something I assume she inherited from her mother, based on family lore.
Mum has always been an expert on buying various items on sale, and ensuring that the pantry was always stocked full of items that could be easily incorporated into larger, diverse arrays of food, prepared quickly.
She'll rattle off the various cuts of meat she has sitting in the freezer, and how she got it at this particular store on sale, and how she'll prepare it for whatever upcoming event is occurring. If going to the checkout counter and watching the total drop when you put in your membership card number and all your coupons was an Olympic sport, my mother would be a gold medalist. She would watch the total, and tell me what it was supposed to be (pre-sales and coupons) and then what it was, and the clerk would utter some expression of surprise, and she would say "it's almost like they pay ME to shop!"
When we get that food home, my mother will stuff it into the fridge until it becomes an "attack fridge". Filled to the brim with everything, including haphazard cans of soda and bottles of water, every frequent guest of our house has learned to literally jump backwards about a foot after opening the fridge, to avoid smashing one's toes with something that fell out.
For pretty much my entire life, my mother has typically hosted at least 8-10 feasts a year at her home, and in my childhood it was perfectly normal to have 25 people at our dinner table at least every 6 weeks. Pagans have at least eight religious holidays a year, and we love any excuse to cook good food and celebrate what we have, so add in all the extra holidays too. More food, more people.
Thanksgiving isn't one of our holidays religiously, but culturally it is. My mother didn’t raise me naive to the suffering of indigenous peoples or the reality of history, but Thanksgiving also wasn’t a “pilgrims & revisionist history” kind of holiday. It was a “make everyone feel home” holiday.
It was never strictly a family holiday, not in my house. There were only really four of us in the immediate family (Mum, me, my two older brothers - my parents were divorced, so I'd see Dad that weekend with that side of the family) --- but then there were the “strays”. Friends of my mother's from college, members of our religious community that had no place to go, coworkers, friends, and as we grew up, my mother always told us "find out who needs a place, they have one with us!".
Many of my friends moved to New Hampshire from out of state (plenty of Free Staters), some could not afford to or did not wish to travel to see their families for the holiday, and they had a plate at our table. Friends of mine who came out as gay and found parents less than receptive to that coming out, found themselves embraced by my mother, and a plate at our table. Neighbors, friends, friends of friends, the orphaned and the lost - and they came to us for Thanksgiving.
I can see old Facebook posts I made the day before Thanksgiving for many years, asking "is there any of my friends near Manchester NH who needs a place for Thanksgiving? I have a plate for you."
People would ask what they could bring, and my mother would always tell them dessert or wine/beverages, maybe salad if they wanted. She would make a giant turkey, sometimes she'd make a chicken for me too because I didn't like turkey, she'd make a pork roast or a spiral sliced ham, she'd make roast beef, potatoes au gratin, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, mashed potatoes, asparagus, smoked salmon, curried vegetables. She also baked half a dozen different kinds of bread, soft feather rolls, herb rolls, cheese rolls, despite having celiac disease herself.
The night before Thanksgiving she and I would prepare breads. It was one of my favorite traditions.
Thanksgiving was always 12-30 people, and the kitchen/dining area in my childhood home would be bursting at the seams, but everyone always had a plate.
Pausing this story to give you some illustrations…
I found a recent Zillow listing for my childhood home, which features new pictures of the dining/kitchen area. Granted, this has been heavily remodeled and looks much nicer than it did in my childhood and has a few modifications that would make the setup both easier and harder now, but we used to line several tables long-wise all the way down the kitchen from the dining room windows and everybody would get a seat.
Here’s the photos:
The flooring at the time looked like this:
I have yet to find the wallpaper online, but it was equally 1950s-1970s busy, I vaguely recall it looking like pages of a recipe book or featuring either food or kitchen related items, and being either tan or light brown. I feel like I’d know it the moment I saw it but I can’t remember it well enough to find it online. This is going to drive me crazy until I find it.
Back to the story…
So in 2010, I moved to Los Angeles. And some years, I have been able to go back, to go "home". I *still* invite random people to have dinner at my mother's house.
But as the decade plus since I have moved across the country has gone by, that is no longer home. It is where I come from, but home is the life I've made here.
Now for several Thanksgivings, I have been able to emulate my mother's feasts here in the West coast, with much more emphasis on vegetarian options, but feeding 10-25 people, and several years even actually roasting a turkey (though as a vegetarian I won't eat it). I have invited various strays I've known here (with probably a disproportionate emphasis on Europeans who don't do Thanksgiving but I'm gonna teach ‘em how!), I've even had the pleasure of hosting Thanksgiving with my Dad here, which was so nice for three years.
It's tough, because Judd's family has always been local, and Thanksgiving is much more of a family holiday to them - whereas Thanksgiving is a "we're ALL family for a day" holiday to me. So we have had a tendency to alternate years with them and doing it my way.
This year, Judd is officially the last of his family in Los Angeles. His brother left for Austin, his mother for Las Vegas. He mentioned to me recently “my family’s gone”, and I pointed out to him that we’re a family now, the two of us, and our eventual children, and our closest friends. So now it feels really real: Thanksgiving is my holiday here, and I do it much like my mother does. Inviting those who need a place to go.
My mother turns 74 on November 27th. I hope she lives a much longer time, and I’m certainly optimistic that she will, but sometimes I contemplate what things will be like when she is no longer with us. I think of all the “strays” she’s adopted over the years at her Thanksgiving table. I think of the fact that I don’t believe my brothers have ever spent Thanksgiving anywhere but at her home.
I wonder where, hopefully a LONG TIME in the future, those she’s brought together will go, when she’s no longer the one to bring them all together.
I hope that’s a very long way away to even worry about.
In the meantime, I’m certainly my mother’s daughter in my hosting and cooking skills. I know I am.
As I opened up the fridges and the freezers to determine what I was making this week, I could almost envision my mother doing exactly the same thing in her kitchen at exactly the same moment, with exactly the same look on her face.
We inherit many things from our parents, and it is reasonable to admit that not all of them are good, but many of them are. The way I do Thanksgiving, the way I cook, the way I fuss over orphans who have nowhere else to go - I know I got that from my mother. That's Thanksgiving to me, and I know it means other things to other people, but I’m grateful to be able to share my version with so many.
I’m grateful for many things this year, and I really can’t list them all, but to keep this focused:
I’m thankful for growing up the way I did, so that this is the way I experience the holiday.
I’m thankful both of my parents are still alive, are reasonably healthy, and able to do their own Thanksgiving celebrations.
I’m thankful for my family across the country and the chosen family I have here.
I’m thankful for the relative health and happiness of those I love, particularly my partner & our pets.
I’m thankful for having far too much food ready for a full table of guests today.
Another post shortly with my recipes / food preparations can be found here:
I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. If you don’t, I hope my stories make you want to.
Awesome writing.
Avens your post was amazing