November days are ticking by, and the holidays, beginning with Thanksgiving, are looming ever closer. Normally, by now, my gears would be revving, preparing to get this holiday underway. But I don’t feel the least bit of pressure this year. Not even a twinge. Why?
Because for the first time in 27 years, my daughters are hosting Thanksgiving, and all I have to do is show up with a dish — preferably gluten- and dairy-free, and vegan if I want every guest to enjoy it.
The fact that my daughters have stepped in and offered to host is not surprising — it’s time. As my older daughter said when we talked about it, “Time to pass the torch, Mom.” Amen.
What is surprising, to me at least, is my willingness to step aside and let it go.
A family tradition
For 20 years, we gathered family and friends in our Queen Anne home each Thanksgiving. “The more the merrier” was our guiding philosophy, particularly when it came to those who had nowhere else to go.
During the week prior to the feast, I would come home from work, get dinner on the table and then afterward, we would tackle one recipe a night. Monday: Cranberry sauce. Tuesday: Side dishes (most famously, mashed rutabaga — an old family recipe consisting of yellow turnips whipped with a couple of potatoes and seasoned with salt, pepper, butter and a little curry. So good.). Wednesday: Pies.
On Thanksgiving morning, I typically slept in, while my husband and daughters put the stuffing in the turkey and stuffed the turkey in the oven. I languished in bed, listening to giggles downstairs as Dan, using the turkey as a puppet, made it talk to the girls, confessing its fears about the hot oven. And they acted as counselors, telling their patient that everything would be OK, just go on in the oven and we’ll see you in a few hours.
After moving onto our sailboat, our challenge was finding a place to celebrate when the girls were home.
One year, we brought all of our food and gear to a cabin on Anderson Island. The car was packed to bursting.
Waiting in the ferry line, I opened the door to let the dog out. The shrink-wrapped turkey fell out of its box, which was wedged against the door. It hit the ground and began rolling down the hill, passing cars and providing instant entertainment as we all — including the dog — chased the turkey, Keystone Cop-style (cue music) down the hill.
The turkey psychologists had their work cut out for them that year.
A nontraditional Thanksgiving
No matter what we did during the post-Queen Anne years, certain core traditions prevailed. My daughters began taking on some of the cooking. But I did not anticipate the day when the entire weight would be lifted.
After years of being “in charge” and having a vision for the tradition I wanted to create for my family, I am perfectly content to let it go. In fact, I am ecstatic!
I mean, I’ll miss all the cleaning, the to-do lists, the grocery shopping, spending a ton of money and the days of cooking. Oh, wait — no, I won’t. Not at all!
I don’t even mind that it will not be a traditional Thanksgiving. With one daughter a vegetarian (probably due to all that turkey trauma) and both objecting to the fact that we raise an extraordinary number of these birds for the express purpose of killing them and eating them all on the same day, there may not even be a turkey.
Instead, my smart, aware daughters have invited a bunch of friends for a potluck feast, expressing their desire to celebrate friendship and solidarity, instead of colonialism and genocide.
Because no matter what we learned in grade school about this holiday — about Pilgrims and Natives sitting down to a harmonious meal — the historical Thanksgiving is a myth, hearkening back instead to a time when the colonists began their systematic takeover of this land.
On the Indian Country Today Media Network website, Ramona Peters, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s tribal historic preservation officer, tells the true story of what happened during that 1621 feast. It’s not even close to what historians would have us believe.
But she adds, “As a concept, a heartfelt Thanksgiving is very important to me as a person. It’s important that we give thanks. For me, it’s a state of being. You want to live in a state of thanksgiving, meaning that you use the creativity that the Creator gave you. You use your talents. You find out what those are and you cultivate them, and that gives thanks in action.”
I am proud of my daughters for calling out the difference, for naming it and for taking on the holiday in their own way.
And I am so looking forward to being a guest whose only responsibility is to show up — with gluten free, dairy free, vegan rutabaga. Done!
IRENE PANKE HOPKINS (irenehopkins.com) is a former longtime Queen Anne resident.