Let's Talk: Take It Easy--It's Just Thanksgiving
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It started about a month ago. No, maybe two months ago. You know the way Christmas creeps earlier every year? Bruce and I actually saw Christmas ornaments on sale at a chain store in mid-September.
But no, I'm not talking about Christmas. That's a done deal. It's been creeping forward since I was a kid. I'm talking about Thanksgiving.
And not the holiday. The storm.
At first, it's a pleasant flurry. How to put back enough stock for your Thanksgiving table. Yams or potatoes--how to choose that essential Thanksgiving side dish.
Then it starts to howl. This year, roast your turkey at 200F (93C). (They neglect to tell you in the headline that the method takes ten to twelve hours, so you better find the masochism setting on your alarm clock.) Thawing your turkey with ace bandages. (No joke.)
Finally, it morphs into an outright blizzard. Until I'm reading enough tweets and blog posts and articles that even I'm starting to get a little nervous. And I'm a food writer. Married to a chef.
How to chew your own wood pulp to make Thanksgiving invitations.
OK, I'm kidding about that last. But still.
I'm a professional. I'm supposed to keep up. But I wonder how it feels when you're not in the business.
Sometimes, I fear we've reached a point where the non-restaurant food industry runs on shame and sadism. You're not doing it right. You're not doing enough. You darn well better start trying to be up to par.
Look, it's just Thanksgiving. It's not about the meal. It's about the thanks. That's the point: family, friends, around a table, more conversation and laughter than stress and insanity. In fact, I would argue that this is the one meal a year when you don't need to impress anyone. You need to have a glass of wine and chill out.
At the risk of offending my fellow foodie friends, let me try to take the bubble off the boil with three suggestions.
1. If making all that food stresses you out, buy parts of it--and buy the best you can comfortably afford. Thanksgiving is probably not the day to become a full-fledged locavore. And if you're not up to roasting the bird, buy a preroasted turkey. Try to get an organic one. I'm in Austin right now and I was in one upscale supermarket that offered roasted heritage birds for pre-order. Pretty nice, that. Or have a bakery make the rolls. Shoot, have a bakery make the pie. Maybe not the bakery in your local grocery store. If your budget allows it, go up a level, to a small local bakery where they're actually baking the pies. Or search out people online who bake pies and rolls in their homes at this time of year to sell to customers who place orders.
2. Don't get locked into a turkey. One way to step back from the frisson of shame and sadism that runs behind, under, and around the professional food business is to forego the traditional menu entirely. Make a ham. Have a pork loin roast. Grill some steaks. Make a slow cooker stew. Have a nice mac-and-cheese with some vinegary salads on the side (green beans in vinaigrette, a cabbage slaw, some sliced tomatoes). If you step back from the incessant, you'll find that you can slow up and be thoughtful. Which is the point, after all.
3. Bring back the dinner party. Not at Thanksgiving but for the rest of the year. Invite friends over, cook up a storm, impress the heck out of them--on the third Saturday of January. If you have more dinner parties, you'll find that the food you serve on the holidays will be far less important. The meal will be less about impressing people--you've done that earlier in the year--and more about enjoying your company.
Most importantly, even if you go whole hog, be thankful in ways meaningful to you.
And say it. Because that's the hard part, right? Maybe that's why we get wrapped up in the food: to avoid harder, more important things. Being thankful--and being thankful out loud--is the meat of the matter. Tell your spouse, your friends, your family that you're thankful for them, that you love them, that your life is better because they're in it, that your life is possible because they're in it. Look them right in the eye and say it.
That's much harder than making dinner. And much more rewarding. Not to mention much, much more healing for the soul.
