Thanksgiving Rituals

My purple-haired mother never stuffed the turkey. She felt she didn’t know it well enough to deal with it in such a personal manner. Instead we had a pan of good old southern cornbread dressing. No sage, no oysters, no canned broth with stale breadcrumbs which resembled…..Well, you know, it just doesn’t look that edible. Our dressing was made with fresh broth from a boiled hen, warm yellow cornbread from an iron skillet, and generous chunks of that fine bird sprinkled on top before baking. With the sautéed onion and the bits of celery, it was a smell to die for when it emerged from the oven. There was also giblet gravy which some poured over it. But not me! Too many giblets that I didn’t recognize.

I don’t do unknown food except for the “mystery meat” which appears on the butter-smeared sandwiches in Eastern Europe. You will find these in every take out shop in every train station from Prague to Bucharest and on most Malev flights. Heavy on butter, with bread three times thicker than needed and then a sliver of something. God knows, I have no idea what it is. It is obviously not toxic, or if so, there is an extended dormancy.

At Thanksgiving, I want my turkey to have legs and my dressing to appear in a Pyrex bowl. Citrus, pears, and apples inside the bird happened after I left home and knew the turkey better.

In October of 1979, my son, John, asked, “Dad, can we have a traditional Thanksgiving?” “Do you mean dressing up like pilgrims?” He said no; so feeling relieved I promised him a traditional Thanksgiving and promptly forgot our agreement.

A week before the holiday, he reminded me of my promise.

“John, what do you mean by a traditional Thanksgiving?”

We always had turkey and the standard side dishes – except no marshmallows on the sweet potatoes. We had long ago eschewed the oyster stuffing that his maternal grandfather had proposed. Too radical! We even served both the jellied, can-shaped cranberry sauce and the kind with whole berries just to placate each sensibility. So I was at a loss to understand what tradition was missing.

“Come with me and I will show you,” he offered.

Now, you must know something about John. Even at a young age, he was very big on image. When I trimmed back the azaleas to curb their jungle-like proportions, he was embarrassed because we had the ugliest yard on the street for several months. He was ashamed of his Schwinn 10-speed because it was not Italian.

Since I had promised, I followed his guide.

He directed me to drive to an upscale shopping area about a mile from our home. He motioned me to park outside a shop, which sold fine china and silver tableware. We were infrequent customers, so I knew their business. I followed John to the rear of the store to a display table set for a formal dinner. In the middle was the source of our “traditional Thanksgiving.” Gleaming in ornate splendor was a domed meat platter, sufficiently large to hold a 25lb. turkey.

It was priced at $8,000.00 since the Hunt Brothers had decided to drive the market that year.

To John, the image from his schoolbook of the Norman Rockwell family around a table with a silver domed platter between two single candlesticks was a traditional Thanksgiving.

We have never made it to have a “traditional Thanksgiving” in the illustrated textbook sense. There have been good years and some not so. There are even years when Boston Market did much of the cooking.

Happy Holiday!