How To Make Even 2020's Thanksgiving Day a Happy One

           It has come to the point that if you say anything happened in 2020, we expect a disaster statement. And, indeed, "Thanksgiving 2020" sounded dismal, what with high coronavirus numbers canceling a visit with my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, and memories of previous Thanksgivings with Mike, my now deceased husband, gnawing at me. But family and friends are still abundant, and Thanksgiving can still be happy.

    (1) The first glimmer of a happy Thanksgiving 2020 was when a friend who is a chef said he would like to cook Thanksgiving dinner for me and a few other Thanksgiving orphans. He would have the dinners ready for pick-up at his house Thursday afternoon. Immediately I felt loved and included.

    (2) Cooking together. Many people say they miss the camaraderie in the kitchen this Thanksgiving, but my daughter-in-law's brilliant idea was for me to lead a Zoom cooking session on Wednesday with some select family and friends. I immediately started poring over recipes (a favorite activity) and finally chose a sweet-potato cheesecake, the grand prize winner for the Sunset Thanksgiving recipe contest in 2005. 

    At the appointed time all the cooks gathered on Zoom, each in our respective kitchen, and started peeling sweet potatoes together, making crusts, and mixing the baked and mashed sweet potatoes with the cream cheese, cream, sour cream, eggs, and sugars. Finally we put our cheesecakes in our ovens and said good-bye. Any of us could have done all this alone, but it was a barrel of fun to do it together. 

The finished cheesecake, already sliced

    (3) A hike is always a good idea. The weather was fine on Thanksgiving morning, so I walked up the Enchanted Forest trail, where bright yellow maple leaves, still autumn-rich, glowed against the dark trunks. I walked down the mountain composing a poem.

    (4) Family connections, such as a heart-warming phone call from my sister Laura just after I got home and, later, a text from my sister Sharon describing her dinner with her husband and a couple of friends. 

    (5) Even though there was only one place setting at the table, I could still make it beautiful, using my heirloom silver and folding the napkin in a rose shape. 

    (5) I could also wear special Thanksgiving-dinner clothes, so I did. 

    (6) Connections with friends. Mid-afternoon I drove down the hill to pick up my dinner. I visited briefly (outside), left some cheesecake with Andy and his family, then drove over the pass to deliver another Andy dinner to friends on Carberry Creek. We had a short visit (everyone masked), and Tracy packed up some squash soup and caramelized Brussels sprouts for me to take home. Then I left to put my own dinner to warm in the oven and to open a bottle of red wine.

    (7) Zoom works. Before eating I did a Zoom call with my son and daughter-in-law, who had prepared a gorgeous Asian meal. We showed each other our Thanksgiving tables and explained our foods. We toasted each other with much love, clinking glasses against computer screens. I sent Thanksgiving greetings to my granddaughter, who, being a 'tween, had declined to join the Zoom call.

    (8) Thanksgiving dinner. Finally I sat down to eat my Thanksgiving dinner. It was superb and beautifully displayed. 

Not quite as beautiful because I had already
dived in, but you get the idea.

The cheesecake was also delicious, a judgment corroborated by all reports from participants and recipients. 

    (9) Give thanks. I poured myself another glass of wine and toasted all the friends and family who had helped make Thanksgiving 2020 an occasion to be thankful for. 

For Thanksgiving, Coming Up

     Food is often the carrier of cultural tradition. Goose and plum pudding were as important for a Victorian Christmas dinner in England (at least, according to Charles Dickens) as turkey is for Thanksgiving dinner in America today. Sometimes, as in the case of Thanksgiving, the food is symbolic of a historical occasion, though maybe as much mythological as historical by the time the food has become traditional. Did the pilgrims really eat wild turkey, corn, cranberries, and pumpkin pie on that first Thanksgiving? How much of our tradition is myth and how much is history? And how much do we really care? It's the food that carries the tradition.

Thanksgiving pies, years ago, when we could be
so close together. I am the pie-maker,
third from the left, in red.

    In today's immigrant-rich world, such food customs mark both the continuation of cultural traditions and their gradual, sometimes grudging synthesis. One of my favorite Thanksgiving stories comes from an essay by the California farmer David Mas Masumoto. He grew up with a Japanese mother who cooked a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner even though her Japanese husband preferred white rice to rolls and no one ate the cranberry sauce because to the Japanese, fruits are desserts.

    "We knew what a holiday table was supposed to look like," Masumoto says, "but no one told us how it was supposed to be eaten." His father didn't know how to carve the meat, either. After a poor show of an effort, he always gave the job to Mrs. Masumoto. who took the turkey into the kitchen, where her family could hear her "whacking and tearing the creature into tiny shreds, as if she were preparing strips for a teriyaki sauce."

    Masumoto himself avoided the carving task until he married a woman from Wisconsin, whose family served Thanksgiving dinner completely comme il faut. Then he learned to carve, prompted, he says, "by my frantic wife when she hosts the family holiday dinner. 'Here,' she says, thrusting the golden brown bird into my hands. I imagine her adding, 'It's time you became a man.'" But in true fusion fashion, the Masumoto family celebrates annually a thoroughly American Thanksgiving and also hosts a thoroughly Japanese open house on New Year's Day, when they laden the tables with "plates of teriyaki chicken, sushi, and somen salad, along with symbolic dishes—long… buckwheat noodles for long life…black beans for good luck, and herring for virility and the blessings of many children." And of course, there is salmon served to the guests with the Japanese explanation: "It's the one fish that always returns home."

    I know that turkey is Thanksgiving food, but maybe this year, when we can't return home because we're COVID-restricted, we should all eat salmon, just to remind ourselves that there'll come a time when we can once again share the Thanksgiving tradition together.

Election Celebration

     When Biden was proclaimed the winner of the 2020 Presidential race, I immediately missed Mike with a pang. Oh, how we would enjoy a celebration together! We might already have had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, ready just in case, and I would have cooked something special, and we would have sat down with such celebration in our hearts, so different from the moment in the middle of the night, four years ago, when Mike climbed into bed telling me Trump had won, and I cried. Now, if Mike were here, we would be enjoying the sudden wind of hope for our country that came blasting in with the election results.

    But, of course, Mike isn't here, so after that moment of missing him acutely, I decided I could celebrate anyway. So I went to town and bought a bottle of champagne and came right home to put it in the refrigerator. While it was chilling, I looked through recipe books and decided on crepes with champagne-poached pears that I would make with the Harry and David Royal Riviera pears a friend had sent me. Using half a bottle of champagne for the poaching, I reasoned, would keep me from either wasting the rest of the champagne or getting roaring drunk, which I didn't want to do. I made the crepe batter and set it aside, per instructions, to rest for an hour.

    Then, since Mike wasn't here to open the champagne, I looked up a YouTube video for instructions. Following those instructions I successfully opened the champagne. I poured half of it into the pot for the poaching, then refrigerated the bottle for dinner.

    I poached the pears, then made three crepes, filled them with pear slices, and poured over them the poaching liquid. I topped them with a couple of scoops of ice cream, poured myself a glass of champagne and sat down to eat. 

    But, first, of course, the toasts.

    First I toasted Joe Biden. Well may his time in office thrive.

    Then I toasted Kamala Harris and her beautiful acceptance speech.

    Then I raised a toast to immigrants. May their families never again be separated.

   I toasted the environment. Welcome back to Bear Claws (I hope) and good tidings to all wild things.

    I toasted good leadership in controlling the coronavirus pandemic.

    I toasted the possibility of reversal of our rapid decline into disastrous climate change.

    I toasted the warm welcome-back our allies will give us, especially in the Paris Accords.

    I toasted all people of all colors and ethnicities in this country: may you find peace and justice, which goes for all of us.

    Then I toasted or started to toast the end of the electoral college, but here I think I was veering into lala land. I don't think Biden said word one about the electoral college in his acceptance speech. Maybe after all these toasts I was getting a wee bit drunk. 

    Maybe it was time to eat my crepes.

Thistle Update

   While we're waiting for an election update, I'll give you a thistles update. You might remember how fierce I was about decimating bull thistles. (See post on July 30, 2020.) I did a remarkably thorough job. I missed one patch of thistles and a few stray individuals, but on the whole I prevented millions of thistle seeds from finding ground.

    You might also remember that I carefully placed purple thistle heads in paper bags because, I said, "buds, even beheaded, can still burst into wind-borne seeds." I stored the sealed bags in the tool shed for burning later in my wood stove.

    Two months later, when I opened the tool shed door, I was shocked to find avalanches of thistle down pouring out of bags.

Mice had smelled the seeds and ripped open the bags, thinking God had sent them manna from heaven. Exposed to the air, thistle blossoms exploded. Invisible seeds borne on feathery wings came tumbling out of the bags like bubbles. They flowed over the shelves like waterfalls. The slightest movement of air from the opened door sent them rising like songs on a breeze. I watched in horror as they floated towards the open door, realizing that I was about to plant a million thistles in my own yard.

    It was a disheartening sight. I would somehow have to clean the mess up, but every movement sent a dozen thistle parachutes into the air. My son suggested I spray them with a very fine water spray, enough to tame the puffs but not enough to dampen the shed.

    That worked. Even a very slight spray made puffs of down sag and cling to each other. I put a snow shovel over the thistles on the floor of the shed, a large piece of cardboard over those the shovel didn't reach, knelt on the ground, and started spraying cascades of thistle down and scooping it into paper bags. I caught large handfuls and compressed them gently, catching with the other hand the floating escapees. 

    I learned to scoop gently, wary of a thorny thistle flower buried inside a thick pile of down. I worked slowly and carefully, clearing one surface before moving to another. I filled one paper bag after another with water-compressed thistle down. I gathered stray floaters and stuffed them, one at a time, into the bag.  I found middens of tiny husks of thistle seeds the mice had left. 

    In the end, I succeeded in cleaning the shed of thistle down, 

but the project isn't finished. I still have loose down in the collection bin, 

and it turns out not to be easy to stuff a bag of thistle down into the stove, whose door is about the same size as a paper bag full of thistle down. Inevitably pieces of down escape and have to be chased down in the house. 

    But once the thistles are in the stove, they make a very satisfying flame.