My Favorite Holiday
Sat., November 20, 11:49 AM
Every year I write something about Thanksgiving, my favorite kind of holiday, but my best explanation is “pre-diary.” So I’m “recycling” an essay I wrote some five years ago.
When I was a child, Thanksgiving was one of the most important holidays in our home, ranked up there with religious holidays. I’ve felt this way all my life, and I don’t really know where it lost its significance to the current generation. Does it need more advertising to compete with Christmas or Halloween? Maybe it’s a little more dignified than that.
Thanksgiving really appealed to immigrants (after all, the Pilgrims were immigrants too), and to those people who didn’t observe holidays like Christmas, it was the all-American celebration. My mother, who had been brought to the United States when she was nine, was one of six children. When she married and moved to Connecticut, she determined to give her family a real New England Thanksgiving. For the next forty years, that’s what she did. My earliest memories of Thanksgiving are of a tiny house overflowing with visitors and abundant delicious food. My father drove back and forth to the railroad station to fetch my grandparents, my aunts and my uncle. Other guests got there on their own power – my other grandmother, my father’s sister and her family. I think the earliest details I can remember must have been from 1943, for my uncle was in uniform; by 1944 he was stationed in England.
It wasn’t easy to buy turkeys in wartime – especially kosher ones – but my father had a customer who raised them. We always had a turkey, even when everyone else in the neighborhood made do with chicken. A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, Daddy would bring home a live turkey to keep in a cellar room until the big day. As we children grew older, we used to peer through the window to see the turkey. Just before Thanksgiving, he took it to the kosher slaughterer, who performed the rituals and got the bird ready for my mother.
The war was over, but it must have been five or six years before we actually ordered our bird from the butcher. I do remember my father bringing a live turkey into the house one year so my mother could weigh it on the baby scale. My baby brother fell out of the crib trying to see the “doggie.”
Size was all-important, and our turkeys were usually twenty pounds or more. My mother had to do the major cleaning of the turkey herself, since it hadn’t been prepared by a butcher. She would be up at the crack of dawn to get it in the oven so that it would have time to cook by mid-afternoon. It’s unsafe to stuff a turkey until just before you roast it, so she would just prepare the ingredients the day before – chestnuts, bread crumbs, chopped vegetables. Nowadays we don’t bother with huge turkeys; as my sister points out, not only is it easier to cook two twelve-pound turkeys, but you get extra drumsticks.
My mother prepared the traditional foods she had heard about, with few exceptions. She made whole berry cranberry sauce when everybody else just had jelly. Her sweet potatoes and carrots with lemon glaze and walnuts were wonderful. She didn’t make pumpkin pie because it’s a dairy food, not kosher on a table with meat. But there was apple pie, often brought by my aunt Dora, a super baker who always supplied extra dessert. The “Brooklyn aunts” carried suitcases of extra goodies, which they believed were unavailable “out in the sticks” of Connecticut.
The appetizer was always grapefruit halves, topped with a cherry. No one could prepare grapefruit as neatly as my father – it was so easy to spoon out – and we seem to have given up that practice since his death. I remember a relish plate with things like olives, celery and carrot sticks, and radish roses. A long-lost recipe is mother’s turkey fricassee, a soup with meatballs. I think that vanished as we realized there really was more food than we needed. Of course there were always leftovers, and my mother packed sandwiches for everyone to take home – especially when my uncle was in the Army. He would carry away a huge parcel to make up for “Army food.”
For Thanksgiving I learned to set a formal table (making sure the everyday flatware went to one of us) and to arrange a pretty fruit bowl. When I got big enough to use a knife, I learned to do the relish plate, including the radish roses. Nothing you ever learn is wasted.
Though I don’t remember a formal “grace,” my father usually said a few words in gratitude for all we had. We were grateful not only for the food but also for the privilege of living in America. Daddy was born in Connecticut of immigrant parents, and his allegiance was always to the United States; adults were especially aware of how lucky we were not to have been born in Germany. (It was understood that no one would mention the atrocities to children.)
Over the years, of course, some things changed. We moved into a larger house. My grandfather and a couple of my aunts moved far from New England. My uncle married and drove each year from New Jersey, bringing my new aunt and cousins. We invited friends to share our dinner, often after the traditional high school football game. One year my Brooklyn aunts went on a cruise that crashed into another ship early Thanksgiving morning; my uncle went to the dock to meet the returning ship, but his wife drove the kids to Connecticut for dinner. The little boys adored my brother, their big cousin.
I can count on my fingers the number of Thanksgivings I missed: the year my cousin got married on Thanksgiving, when we didn’t do dinner; the first year I was married, when my husband had to work and I stayed home. By the next year, we had begun new traditions as I began to display my own recipes.
My cousins were growing up and not always available for family celebrations, but my own children filled in the gaps. It was still a big family get-together and one of my favorite holidays. Even after my father died, we continued to go to my Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving.
Finally my mother left Connecticut, and just once we traveled to New Jersey for Thanksgiving dinner with my aunt and uncle. (My mother brought the turkey!) The big family included my cousin’s in-laws and her children; but somehow it wasn’t the same.
Thanksgiving came back to Connecticut, at my sister’s house; on the Wednesday, along with all the shopping and cooking, Sister drove a couple of hours to bring my mother home. Thanksgiving with my sister and brother-in-law became the new tradition, even after my mother died. (One exception was the year my brother invited us to a “real” Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. We even had snow!)
One year my sister was too ill to cook or to travel. We went to her house and I cooked. I may not be as good a cook as she, but the tradition continued. Eventually, we moved the celebration to my house.
Yes, a lot has changed. I don’t prepare as much food because overeating just isn’t good for any of us. But the menu is similar: roasted stuffed turkey; sweet potatoes (my sister brings them); my cranberry chutney, as well as my daughter’s chili cranberries; spicy apple pie. Apple cider, and perhaps a nice wine for those who can still drink wine. Mashed potatoes for Husband who doesn’t like sweet potatoes (there’s someone every year). Spinach casserole – an extra vegetable that’s easy to make. A few dishes (including extra stuffing) made without turkey – for the vegetarian.
Who comes? My adult children, my sister and brother-in-law, any friends who are interested. I’m always happy to have them, for food is still plentiful if space is not. After sixty years, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
