Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and I am looking forward to my favorite holiday with equal parts dread and excitement. Perhaps you share my anxieties, my anticipation, my craving for cocktails, for despite the fact that we need not burden ourselves with the hassles wrapping gifts, decorating trees and baking thousands of Christmas cookies that you will likely disallow your own family from eating only to discover dozens still in the freezer next year, this holiday comes with it’s unique problems and accompanying drama.

When I was a kid, my father, who was put in an orphanage by his own mother despite the fact that she wasn’t dead, would ruin our family Thanksgiving each year by bringing virtual strangers to our intimate table. Usually some loser he worked with, a client (he was a social worker) or some other random person that the rest of us didn’t know. I recall my mother also being somewhat put off that she would be entertaining someone who might arrive dressed in sweat pants, and would probably dominate my father’s attention for the day, but she must have grasped the concept of compassion better than I did, because she never turned anyone away.

Somewhere along the way, however, I seem to have adopted this open door policy. For the last fifteen years I’ve welcomed the masses to my home for Thanksgiving; if you couldn’t stay for dinner, you had to come for a cocktail, and please bring your guests!  It must have been after the first year I mixed Maverick’s family with mine, I realized that the more bodies I had to buffer the conversations between them, the better. What I didn’t anticipate, however, was that the numbers would soon surpass my meager 12 complete  “Woodland” place settings, and that I would have to rent tables, chairs and tableware to accommodate everyone for the formal, 5 course, sit-down Thanksgiving Feast I insisted upon. I would turn up my nose at the suggestion of serving “buffet style” and using “paper plates.” We were going to sit around a dining room table, with a turkey in the middle, join hands and say Grace, god damn it, whether it landed me at Betty Ford or not!! There were the years that followed when I stuck my head deep into the oven as I basted the turkey I was “overcooking” that was going to “be dry” and who’s “thermometer must be broken” (according to my gracious guests) to put myself out of my misery, only to realize that I couldn’t kill myself that way if the oven was actually lit, and all I was doing was causing my hair to frizz and stink like poultry. Those were my pregnant years when I was afraid to have more than one drink in public.

Since then I have made it my own, private, Thanksgiving tradition, to pop a bottle of bubbly at the kick-off of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and toast myself for being such a great hostess. That first bottle is for me alone, and it’s a good thing I don’t have to share because there’s no way I’d be so pleasant to all my guests by the time they arrive, late, as usual. Furthermore, I have embraced the buffet, as I’m much more relaxed eating over my sink, like I do every day at lunchtime. Plus it keeps me looking busy so I don’t have to get into a conversation with my Aunt Gertie about her vaginal dryness.

I’d like to share some of my secrets to a perfect Thanksgiving, so you too, can have a lovely day.

First of all, drop the formality. Buffet is king!! I’m still not big on the paper plates for the main course: if you’re too cheap to pay for Chinette, someone’s overloaded plate will end up on your floor and they’ll enlist your dog to clean it up and she’ll end up barfing in your bed when you finally hit the sack at about 2:30 in the morning. You should, however, utilize paper for dessert, and continue to make the excuse that the dishwasher didn’t finish running, lest your guests think you’re  white trash.

Rethink the way you let people “help” you. Everyone says they want to help, but do they really? Let’s face it, you have a certain way you want to do things and if your guests aren’t going to get right on board with you, tell them to step off. If they are not willing to follow the recipe you send them, if they are going to bring a store bought when you asked for homemade, don’t count on them to “help.” How’s this for helping: if you are a vegetarian, DON’T bring a tofu turkey, if you are allergic to wheat, DON’T bring wheatless muffins, and so on and so on. If you can’t eat a certain something, just push it aside and don’t make a scene. For god sakes, it’s THANKSGIVING and there will be plenty of something that you can eat and if you can’t, give thanks that you will be the one person in the country that will not put on 5 pounds in a day. And finally, if you said you’ll bring an appetizer, don’t show up 2 hours late. That’s not helpful. Nor is it helpful when you bring your dish unassembled and try to cook in my kitchen. Recognize that the only appliance you will be allowed to acquaint yourself with is the microwave and the dishwasher.  And if you are very, very good, maybe the coffee maker.  But never the espresso machine.

Don’t skimp on the booze. Let it flow, paying special attention to keeping the glasses of your most difficult guests filled. True, this has been known to backfire on rare occasions. There was the time 95 year old Nanna went rogue and tried to show the great-grandkids how young she looked by taking off her wig. But that was only once, and their nightmares had abated by springtime. (Or so you assumed, as they weren’t your kids, it really wasn’t your problem anyway.) And the time your brother-in-law’s uncle who isn’t really his uncle, did that creepy puppet show and later clogged up your toilet.  And didn’t tell you. It’s more likely that Nanna will pass out way before the turkey is served and won’t even have an opportunity to tell you how you ruined it; and you don’t invite that creepy “uncle” anymore anyway, so there’s no problem there. Additionally, you need to keep your own glass full, and often, as the day is long.

While we are the topic of keeping your own glass full, heed my warning: the day is long. You need to hang in there. Losing control at any time can result in damage that runs the gamut from regretting that you openly gave thanks for never having to lay eyes on your grandmother in the nude, to giving your 5-year-old nephews permission to take their dinner into your living room, to passing out on the powder room floor, which would leave your guests in charge of cleaning up and you will be searching for things in your kitchen until the new year.

Lastly, if you like to say grace by having each person around the table announce what they are thankful for, do yourself a favor and ask them to submit their thanks on paper, in advance, notarized. You do not want to hear that your father in law is thankful for the sexy chick at the gym, or that your long lost cousin is thankful she was able to rid herself of that nasty case of crabs, or your own kid announcing he’s thankful the bug he found on his head wasn’t a tick. You want these people to be thankful for generic things like low interest rates, artificial sweeteners, and George Clooney. Oh, and the gracious generosity of their hostess.