And That’s What It’s All About

My fifth child, Hannah – age 16, has taken Thanksgiving for her favorite holiday. I think it’s just the food but, who knows, perhaps she is thankful for more than a 3,500 calorie meal consumed with the unbridled avarice that is usually reserved by most children for Christmas. But I’m with her, I’d rather have a day of of eating preceded by a week of cooking than a day of raw consumerism preceded by a month of “whadda we gunna buy” who head scratching and bank emptying. Perhaps I’m succeeding as a parent but, like the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell.

In all of this my family thinks I’m a bit nuts since I insist on doing most of the cooking each year. As I pound this keyboard a 20 lb. turkey sits roasting in the oven and I have a sweet potato- banana casserole with a pecan streusel topping set to go in while after the bird comes out to rest. The one dish, demanded by several in the Budge zip code, that I won’t make is that salad with mandarin oranges and those little marshmallows. I fall into a state of cognitive dissonance when I try to figure out how exactly that food came into the modern American culinary lexicon but I have to figure that Kraft Foods had something to do with it  in the 1950’s when they hired legions of crackpots to make up recipes that they could print on the backs of prepared chemically ridden foodstuffs to increase sales. James Lileks has even written a book on the entire disaster titled The Gallery of Regrettable Food that demonstrates the decade when Americans lost all touch with dietary sensibility. It was a period where the makers of Jell-O were determined to instruct us that all we needed in life was a cache of the jiggly collagen combined with random stuff in the pantry and we would have a lifetime of Norman Rockwell moments of Mom and the kids sitting at a happy dinner table while Dad as captain over the brood sits satisfied that he is the master of the universe and he has a pipe and Prince Albert in a can waiting as reward for his banal stewardship. I was alive then and can attest to such a reality.

Although this isn’t my favorite holiday, although it might be if it came with a great many pyrotechnic explosions, it’s right up there. It’s a day when I have the high privilege of being able to both cater to loved ones and indulge in my avocationous love of food. It also gives me a day when, and they are scarcer as the kids grow up, to have everyone at the table where I can engage in good humored judgmentalism and let them know how I think they should be leading their lives. The good news, I suppose, is that they have all become expert in ignoring my advice while laughing at my judgments – else I think they would stop coming to dinner.

I know there are so many things for which to be grateful and, as I instruct my kids, life is much better when we count what we have rather than what we have not. I suppose I could go on with some long smarmy jingoistic pap about love of country – which I do in fact love – but today is the day when I get to sit in the captains chair and look into the faces that have made it this far in life without a great deal of want or tragedy knowing that I’m lucky enough just in them. And oddly enough when I’m surrounded by these people, who oft times are the source of severe dyspepsia, it is they that make me feel safe in my life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.