Thanksgiving, as I sit here and write is tomorrow. Thanksgiving was very important to me growing up. Since my family (and I) are Jewish most of the mainstream family holidays (Christmas, Easter) were not our holidays and we did not observe or celebrate them. But Thanksgiving was different - it was for all Americans (and any one visiting the country also).
When I met my husband (who is Roman Catholic) and as we progressed through dating to marriage we started celebrating each other’s holidays with the each other’s families. That left Thanksgiving as the only holiday both families wanted us for. We tended to go to his family, but sometimes went to mine. We got married and this continued. Then came the year his sister got married - a week or so before Thanksgiving. We did not want to go to dinner with just his parents and grandmother, but did not want to leave them alone and go to dinner with my family. What to do?
I then made a suggestion that shocked and surprised my husband - “Let’s have both families here for Thanksgiving dinner”. I then found the real difference between the two families. It was not being from different “old countries”. It was not the difference in religion. It was - his family ate out for almost all holidays and mine ate home for almost all holidays. The concept of making dinner for and having 10 people shocked and scared him. My mom used to have that and more for family holiday dinners and to do so was what I expected out of life. He was further concerned as we lived in our apartment then - “Where would we put everyone?’ We had a long living room and I figured we would get (we ended up borrowing from his parents) folding tables and set them up end to end to make one long table.
Both families agreed to come. We were a little rocky that first year. We overreached. Luckily we started the night before. We planned on making our own stuffing which used chestnuts - I never knew that under the shell chestnuts had a skin, which also had to be removed - it took forever. We put together some food dish or other and had it on the counter. I dropped a glass - the food was covered in glass and had to be thrown out. But we did it. Lack of serving space? Cover the portable clothes dryer with a table cloth, push it in the corner of the living room - bar. People had a problem walking past each other at the table, but it all worked out. I even saw a different side of my, always seemingly austere, grandfather - someone made an inadvertent double meaning comment (meaning off color in the unintended meaning) and my grandfather laughed like crazy with everyone else and so did husband’s grandmother.
It was so successful that we continued for 25 years to make Thanksgiving dinner for the combined families. We got much better at it. The year we moved to this house we moved in October. I promised that we would make Thanksgiving dinner - even if we ate off of paper plates. (The china was on the table for the dinner.) The problem we found we had was that the dinning room was square, not long and we had to deal with fitting in tables. Until we bought a dining room table some years later we came up with plywood pieces which clamped to our old kitchen table and made a huge square table and had to be assembled and disassembled each year.
The only thing that stopped us, finally, from continuing to make Thanksgiving dinner was bed bugs. Since we no longer feel comfortable having anyone in the house we no longer have people in. Since then my family eats dinner at my sister’s house and his family goes out for dinner. We eat alone. In the 8 years since then we have eaten Thanksgiving dinner in a chain buffet or made dinner for the two of us. (One has a lot of leftover turkey when one makes dinner for two.) The chain buffet closed this year. That left us looking for an alternative. There was one possible place that we could sort of afford, but we had never been there and reviews online were not the best. So this past weekend it was “officially” decided that we make dinner at home.
Now to keep organized over the years I made lists. Starting the second year we made Thanksgiving I wrote them in a spiral notebook. At first it not only included a list of what we would have, but also lists of what each item would be cooked and served in. Over the years since the menu mostly repeated I knew which items would be used for cooking and serving. I knew that, as odd as it sounds, the first thing to start cooking when we got up Thanksgiving (late) morning was the potatoes for mashed potatoes. The first year we had found out that there was a large local deli which was open on Thanksgiving and we could order the turkey cooked and ready for a hot pickup in the afternoon - my sister and her husband (and children) would pick it up for us on their way here (we paid) as they went past the place anyway. Over the years the place shut down and we started getting the turkey from their other location - closer to my sister than us. Not having a turkey in the oven left room for everything else.
At the height of our hosting Thanksgiving I would start cooking on Tuesday having already cleared the dining room as much as possible - including moving small pieces of furniture to our studio on the other side of the kitchen. I baked Venetians (aka rainbow cookies). They had to be baked and put together with the jellied centers on one day, left overnight with a heavy book on them and then chocolate melted and frosted it on another day. I would make beef vegetable soup (PA Dutch recipe) on Wednesday and bake an apple pie and brownies (brownies were from a mix). Wednesday night we would put together the sweet potatoes (no marshmallows, Colonial Williamsburg recipe) and bake the pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving day we would make the rest of the items and bake the sweet potatoes. A couple of times I made and baked rolls from scratch and once a baked a tea bread (CW recipe again) from scratch. Sometimes I made biscuits instead. Nieces and nephews however like the can popping open however, and we mostly made rolls from refrigerated dough. (These rolls are no longer made by the popping can company or any other.)
Each year I would look at my list of dishes from the year before. We would discuss it and possibly make changes - Would something new work? Do we need more of less of something. More of something? Did his sister want salad? Was my sister vegetarian that year? Did my niece decide she was kosher that year and would bring her own food? (Did not last beyond 2 years.) We would adjust the menu. But year to year it remained organized. My sisters, mom and I were used to working together on getting out the food and clearing up and husband’s sister made her best efforts to help. As nieces came along they helped - young children like to help - but nephew preferred the living room and playing. I would do the dishes, etc. after everyone left. In the apartment by hand and here in the dishwasher. Here in the house I would also wash and dry the tablecloth and napkins overnight. Since we stopped having the family in, the dish washer has broken so I am back to washing by hand. When we went to/go to sleep at night on Thanksgiving everything has been washed (or was being washed in the dishwasher). It does take a few days or a week to put it all back, but all is always cleaned that night.
Our guest list would change - it got smaller when my dad died, larger with each niece or nephew, a boyhood friend of husband’s who lived out of town, was down for the holidays a couple of times and joined us for dinner. Husband’s sister’s mother-in-law was added to the guest list for several years before we stopped. We first heard that his sister and her husband were going to adopt a child at dinner one year. My niece had her first “food” - applesauce - at Thanksgiving dinner one year.
I have the recipes in the computer. I used to use a cookbook program, but it needs a parallel printer directly hooked up to the computer on a specific port, so it is no longer usable. It used to be great, it would resize recipes and calculate the revised ingredient list and had a shopping list feature. I had put in the location of foods in our supermarket and I would have a shopping list printed out in the order I needed to find the foods. When I saw its life coming to an end I printed all the recipes and scanned them back into the computer as pdf files so I would not lose the recipes. I have to calculate ingredient quantities for changes in servings and make my own shopping lists, but I still can print the recipes out. One advantage to this when making an assortment of items, is that when an item is done being prepared, the recipe is tossed out. Helps keep track of what is done and what needs to be done.
So if we have been so organized and good at it, why has this year been such a mess? We did not decide until the last minute that we were making dinner for ourselves. (We had kept waiting for the magic restaurant to appear for us to go to for dinner.) On Sunday while in Costco we saw turkeys for 99 cents a pound. We were not going straight home and did not want the turkey sitting in the car for hours so we did not buy one.
Tuesday we had a list of what we would make and needed ingredients. - some our traditional ones, some husband picked to make it easier for me. We set out to food shop. In my mind we would buy items which did not need refrigeration (since they were more Thanksgiving related they might sell out) and then get a turkey at the Costco near us. Husband had planned to buy the turkey first in case we had a problem finding one - but did not tell me why he was buying it first, so I pushed to get it later. We bought stuff at Walmart and the supermarket next to it. (I may or may not have mentioned that our Walmarts do not have the supermarket Walmarts commonly have and there is a separate, unrelated supermarket next to the Walmart we normally go to.) We then set off, not to the Costco near us, but to the one we normally go to (which we like it better than the one near us) to get the turkey.
Horrors! There were no more 99 cent a pound turkeys! The only turkeys they had were $3.29 a pound as they were organic. Panic! My mind went to what we could have instead of turkey. I remembered we bought 2 ham portions - one for Christmas and one for whenever - when last in Lancaster, PA and I figured if stuck we would have “French Turkey” which is ham. Husband drove to a specialty food store located near Costco which had opened here this year - a chain from Connecticut. We had been very disappointed when we went to see this store after decades of hearing about it - very expensive, but I followed him into the store. He moved so quickly that I lost sight of him before I got to the store. I kept thinking I was seeing his red winter jacket - but when I got to where I thought I saw him it would be an employee in a red apron. I finally caught up with him at the turkey case. They had LOTS of turkey - even better and - important at this point - was that the turkeys were not frozen. We picked out one that is probably too big for us, and brought it home. $1.69 a pound, not the 99 cents we planned, but not $3.29 either.
Today Wednesday we went to the supermarket to buy the items which we did not buy yesterday as they need to be refrigerated and we did not want to drive around with them yesterday while getting the turkey. We ended up changing the menu while there. I had planned on baking him a pumpkin pie. He decided we should buy one instead. I make it for him with less sugar and no pie shell (believe it or not the latter part - no pie shell - is from Libbys and uses its basic pie recipe). He decided it was too much trouble, so we bought a pie and I ran around putting back things such as eggs which we were buying to bake the pie. What had settled the matter was a free apple pie for me with the purchase of his pumpkin pie (or vice versa). Both treats for us which will be eaten over many days as we are limited in eating sweets.
I had planned on clearing out the dining room yesterday and today - in particular the items for the RV which sit under the dining room table in RV season and get stored in the RV for the winter, but did not have a chance due to the running around shopping. We keep our dining room table, without the boards to the table, against the wall when not in use. (This was done in the 1700s and is very convenient allowing use of the empty space in the middle of the room for other projects.) I will pull it into place in the middle of the room and stack the RV stuff (and any weaving stuff, etc. stored in the dining room) against the wall out of the way.
I did polish the silverware we will use. It has been some years since it was polished and the heating of the house to kill the bed bugs did not help. I have been picking out for us the less tarnished looking pieces. Surprisingly it did not take as long as I remembered to polish what we needed - and I put the pieces in a zip bag to keep them relatively free of tarnish. Perhaps I will finally get around to polishing the rest of the silverware and lining the drawers they are kept in with the special fabric to prevent tarnishing to protect it. In the meantime, the pieces I have polished will be returned to the sealed bag when we are done with them.
Somehow the dining room will be ready. I will get up tomorrow and put the turkey in the oven and go back to sleep. Everything will come out okay - worse comes to worse, it is just us.
My best wishes to all of you who are in the U.S. for a wonderful Thanksgiving.
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