Thanks But No Thanks
After two years, we’ve parted ways with Turkey Day
This was me last year:
Forget I ever wrote that. We completely let go of Thanksgiving this year. It was just a Thursday in November at our place. We had salmon.
Let me tell you how we came to the determination to carve Thanksgiving Day out of our lives. The first issue was practical: It’s a pain in the ass to find many of the ingredients for a traditional turkey dinner. Farmers send whole turkeys out to supermarkets in time for Christmas because the French don’t celebrate this particular tribute to colonization. You can’t make gravy from the turkey drippings because you can’t get runoff from small, lean turkey breasts. Pumpkin pie is not a thing here, and I will not make my own pastries in France, because why?
Aside from the inconvenience, there’s the vibe. Everybody here is just going to work or school on Thanksgiving Day. The parades, football games and National Dog Show exist only inside a different time zone. We have no shared experience with our neighbors and trying to recreate that conviviality – even if all the turkey guts and marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes were available – feels forced and artificial. There’s just no genuine holiday joy.
Other considerations we pondered centered on that warm family feeling of Thanksgivings past. The big, loud dinners at the Russell family home. The sweet, intimate ones at my mother’s house. Our parents are all gone now so there will be no phone call to wish Don’s mom a Happy Thanksgiving, to ask about all the various side dishes, and wonder what lonely souls she had invited to the table this year.
Don’t feel sorry for us. Not for a minute. Around here, we get that joyful holiday feeling often because the French love their holidays. Religious ones. National ones. Frequent school breaks. They just don’t have one on the fourth Thursday in November. (They do, however, celebrate Black Friday.)
It’s not like we need a holiday to practice the significance of Thanksgiving: gratitude. As a Yoga Therapist I often suggested gratitude practices to clients because they have been proven to decrease stress and improve mental and physical health. The best part about it is that the practice works even if you don’t find things to be grateful for.
One of my favorite gratitude practices is one that Don and I do daily, without even trying. Him: “Thank you for making a lovely breakfast.” Me: “Thank you for cleaning up.” We repeat this at lunch and dinner, taking turns with the cooking and the cleaning, and we both get to receive and express gratitude. You don’t even need stuffing or apple pie for it to work.
Even after all this contemplation, finally leaving Thanksgiving behind this year was not an easy process. I nearly backed out earlier this week when I spied a bag of fresh cranberries at the supermarché. I picked them up, put them down, wheeled my cart away, then turned around and threw them in my basket. “Maybe,” I thought. “Just maybe.” When I got home I asked Don again if he was sure, absolutely sure, that he didn’t want to do Thanksgiving this year. His response was quick and decisive. He was absolutely sure.
I’m still going to make some kind of cranberry sauce thing this weekend, though, because it might be nice to put on our French yogurt.
I have fond memories of Thanksgiving on the farm I grew up on. It was primarily a gathering of the German side of my family, with inlaws and outlaws descending for a true farm style feast that my Grandmother spend days preparing from what we grew and harvested on the farm. Goose, ham, root vegies, legumes, apple pies, and dandelion wine that my sisters had picked the flowers for.
But for a long time, we haven't celebrated the day Native Americans may or may not have fed the undocumented immigrants come to take their land away, my ancestors among them. I love to cook, so I often prepared dinner for whomever was nearby. Usually goose, a tribute to my German heritage.
This year, some new British friends invited us to their ancient manor house in rolling hills of Bretagne for "Thanks Giving" day, with wonderful roast duck, Yorkshire pudding, crispy dressing, roasted potatoes, key lime pie, and lovely ginger based non-alcoholic drinks. One of them said a beautiful prayer of gratitude that she'd composed. We were, indeed, grateful for their kind invitation.
As Meister Eckhart wrote: "If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
The first 42 Thanksgivings in my life were complicated: Divorced parents who remarried and most of the extended four families lived nearby, so my sister and I attended 3 or 4 traditional turkey meals between noon and 7pm. It was exhausting. And no one in my house even enjoys turkey.
For the past 12 years, things have gotten much, much easier: The four of us often opt to have a cozy day at home and we've created food traditions that work for us: 2 savory pies for dinner and 2 sweet ones for dessert. Easy peasy.