For years, I had a thanksgiving tradition with my Mom. We woke up and cooked the turkey (usually large enough to serve 18 people) while we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Later in the afternoon, our family would begin arriving, each member carrying a dish or a dessert that they had prepared specifically for our feast. I remember as a child thinking that all these dishes (string bean casseroles, sweet potato pie, jello molds, cobbler, etc.) must have been difficult to prepare and that they’d spent hours in the kitchen slaving away over their delicious perfections. I mean, hell, the turkey itself took two hours to prepare and four hours to cook.
But this year it is a little bit different. There are five of us at the table. And the turkey – it’s not even a turkey. It’s just the breast. It took half the time to cook and prepare. But it’s not the size of the turkey or the number of guests at our table that caused a stir; it is that this year, I helped prepare the other dishes – the dishes that up until now I believed my relatives slaved away over a stove all day making. And what really shocked me (and I say this as comically as I possibly can), is how wrong my expectations had been. I must have had a lot of faith in my family to actually expect them to spend hours “slaving” over a stove. I suppose I should have known my family doesn’t “slave.” More importantly, I probably should have expected that everything they make in the kitchen would have taken as little effort as possible.
The jello mold took ten minutes, the string bean casserole took twenty, my mother bought dessert from the bakery, and my Nana’s sweet potato pie – a dish that to me was the most anticipated, most delicious, and most yearned after to learn how to prepare – was the easiest of them all. Nana once joked with me that a sweet potato pie took three hours to make because she had to peel the potatoes, soak them to make them soft, slice up the pineapple and then mix them up all together. Turns out her biggest secret is that it took twenty minutes to make. And she didn’t peel potatoes, soak ‘em, and slice up the pineapples. She bought cans!! And all we had to do was open them, pour them into a big bowl, mash them up, and put them into a casserole dish. That was it! The most time consuming part was the mashing! And don’t you know Nana would kill me if she knew I was giving away her secret.
I think what disappoints me the most (and again, I say this comically), is the way my imagination far exceeded reality when it came to Thanksgiving and my family’s effort. It was like being a little girl with dreams that one day I’d host a Thanksgiving dinner, spend all day cooking and knowing that my family was doing the same, thus making our impending feast that much more rewarding, turned into a harsh reality that I could probably cook the whole damn dinner by myself and not even break a sweat.
Regardless, I suppose I can be relieved that as a girl who is more likely to burn down the kitchen than produce anything edible, contributing (or better yet, hosting) my own Thanksgiving meal down the road may not be as farfetched as I had previously imagined. Somehow, I’m able to bake gooey cookies, chewy brownies, and make a wicked macaroni and cheese, so perhaps the skill level needed to produce our family’s traditional Thanksgiving meal is within my range. Instead of being disappointed in the lack of effort needed, I should be grateful. After all, this is a holiday in which you count your blessings. So here is to a simple Thanksgiving with simple dishes, and going forward, very simple expectations.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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