Our national holiday, Thanksgiving Day, is a time for football, friends, family, feasting, feelings of gratitude, celebration of our freedoms, and reflection on our foundation. A day of immersion in the physiology of communing, breeding, feeding, digesting, nesting, and resting, and a reprieve from the grind and the physiology of fortressing, fighting, fleeing, freezing, faltering, or, for some, even fainting.
Even without the specter of covid hanging over us, it's been a long time since my extended family gathered together and had a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving meal. I miss my mother's turkey and my aunt's dressing (she always made two kinds: oyster and non-oyster). I miss my other aunt's collard greens and her black-eyed peas and the sweet potatoes she garnished with marshmallows and pecans. Most of all, I miss my granny's dinner rolls, who no one's been able to recreate since she passed away.
Another big Turkey Day is here. Millions of families across the country are cooking food. Some will eat family style at a table. Others will lineup a buffets. Everyone will be dreaming of making up their best plate. For many that will include heaping piles of all sorts of delicious goodness. For my kids it will be Hawaiian dinner rolls and sliced apple. We asked for your favorite Thanksgiving Day plates. Here's what you shared.
You've got your one leg, two legs, three legs, four legs, five legs, six legs of turkey. You've got your green bean casserole, your mac and cheese, your mashed potatoes, and your cranberry sauce that plops from the can. You've got pies you've ready to die fighting to get an extra slice of. You're ready for Thanksgiving, and you're ready for football.
Thanksgiving is all about tradition so our starter is served piping hot from Detroit, as it has been since 1934, and it could be a classic between the (7-4) Lions and the (7-3-1) Green Bay Packers. The records look pretty but they are both still a win behind the Chicago Bears at the NFC North's summit while Detroit would just miss out on a wildcard as it stands owing to Green Bay's draw.
I've prepared a variety of meals, including the traditional roast turkey with the sides I grew up with: mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, candied yams, and, because we were a house often divided, pecan pie AND pumpkin pie. I've also done a gigantic paella, which I prepared over a wood fire during one unseasonably warm Thanksgiving, and spent Thanksgiving in Spain, eating tapas.
It's easy to be cynical about Thanksgiving. The origin story that we're all told of a friendly exchange of food between the pilgrims and the Native Americans is, at best, a whitewashed oversimplification. And then there's Black Friday, an event that has hijacked one of our few non-commercialised holidays and used it as the impetus for a stressful, shameless, consumerist frenzy.
Tonight's South Park is something of a breather in what has been their most story-driven season (or seasons, as it turned out) ever. There is some advancement to the overriding plot of Donald Trump attempting to kill the unborn baby he's expecting with his lover, Satan, before it can unleash the prophesied apocalypse a plot that involves master manipulator (and new Trump sex partner) JD Vance and billionaire/self-proclaimed antichrist expert Peter Thiel (recently incarcerated by South Park's finest for kidnapping Eric Cartman).
The holiday's energy is on point. Happy Thanksgiving! Today's unpredictable energy entices you to break free from usual traditions. The moon continues through experimental Aquarius, daring you to keep an open mind. But by lunch time, its confrontation with Uranus - the cosmic wild card - stirs up last-minute changes. Expect shifting plans or surprising conversations. If you can avoid that chaos, you'll feel a deeper sense of calm and control as the day eases on.
Of course, that's not true; there's always baggage. Every society that thrives today does so with a debt to a history filled with pain, exploitation and self-serving decision-making. It's painful to point it out, but if we can't point it out on Thanksgiving - when we literally give thanks for the bounty that we enjoy as Americans - then when can we?
There's always something of a melancholy tinge to Thanksgiving, an unspoken, primal awareness not only that this is one final bacchanal before the privations of winter set in, but that gratitude can't really exist without the experience of grief. The things and the people we feel most thankful for are too often the ones that are no longer with us. Perhaps that helps explain why several new films this Thanksgiving season center on loss and how to move on from it.
I've never cared much for Thanksgiving. As a child, the forced family gathering was tolerable only because it marked the halfway point to Christmas (if we are measuring from Halloween, which is what we do in holiday math). As an adult, I came to understand some of the complications in celebrating a holiday with such a (distinctly American) white-washed backstory.
In the spirit of giving, affordable housing developer Tredway partnered with City Harvest, New York City's first and largest food rescue organization, to distribute more than 500 turkeys and 7,000 pounds of fresh produce including sweet potatoes, peppers and lemons to families in need at the Sea Park Apartment Community, a three-tower complex in Coney Island, on Nov. 25.
Google uploaded its Thanksgiving Doodle to the Google Search home page, google.com. It is a typical and expected cute Google Doodle - more on that later. But when you click on it, you are not taken to the Google search results page, instead you are taken directly into AI Mode. And the AI Mode results don't say anything about the Doodle itself.
Kringles are a kind of pastry that's synonymous with my home town of Racine, Wisconsin. Originally introduced by Danish immigrants in the late 19th century, they're essentially a big ring of flaky Viennese pastry filled with fruit or nuts, then iced and served in little slices. Even bad kringles are pretty delicious, and when out-of-towners try them for the first time, their reaction is usually: Where has this been all my life?
When you go to the ice box Saturday and open that recycled Country Crock container full of what's left from your Aunt Nancy's artichoke casserole, it reminds of you of Thanksgiving dinner and the laughs shared around the table with family and friends. But it also reminds you that Aunt Nancy is a bit off-kilter, because there are actually three butter containers packed with her gluten-free artichoke casserole that no one ate because she fills it with sliced grapes.
In the English language, the turkey gets kind of a tough break. Talking turkey requires serious honesty and speaking harsh truths. Going cold turkey is, often, an onerous way of quitting something completely and suddenly. Being a turkey is a rude zinger thrown at movie and theatrical flops, as well as unpleasant, failure-prone people. Yet, in the culinary world, the turkey looms large, particularly during November.
But there are also those among us who would prefer not to have random drunk family members passed out in our living room and instead opt for a night out at our favorite restaurant. This is a story about those unlucky few of us who, year after year, open our establishment's doors to the masses and serve hundreds of turkeys, thousands of potatoes, and an incalculable amount of wine. There are two types of people that volunteer to work at
Thanksgiving, as it tends to be celebrated, is the most honest American holiday: all appetite, no apology. Every other event on our civic calendar asks us to remember something noble, or to mourn something tragic, or to celebrate something grand or abstract, but Thanksgiving just asks us to be hungry together, and then to eat. In any year, this would be a potently simple path to commonality;
