What we eat for dinner on Thursday, Nov. 24, 1988 may seem a trivial issue. To everyone, that is, except the Thanksgiving Day cook.
”On Thanksgiving Day, people get caught up with perfection, with trying to please everyone,” says Deane McCraith, a Newton, Mass., family therapist. ”The cook tries to match grandmother`s Thanksgiving dinner, or overdo it in another direction. The thought that there will never be another meal like this one pervades the whole day.”
”It is what I call,” McCraith says, ” `the Last Supper mentality.` ”
The issues of The Day are small, but fascinating. And there is some solace in recognizing Everyman`s problems:
”My cousin refused to eat anything but real butter. My father wanted no butter in the house,” McCraith says. ”The big problem was how to serve mashed potatoes so my cousin wouldn`t know there was margarine in the potatoes. We just put the margarine in and told him it was butter.
”Then there is the whole thing of dark meat and white meat. Will there be enough? Do we have to get another leg? Families actually divide around the issue of dark meat and white meat,” McCraith says.
Indeed, the traditional turkey seems to evoke as much stress as applause. Last year, Anne Vanderwarker, a Near North Side interior designer, bought a fresh turkey. Not a frozen turkey, but a 24-pound, very fresh specimen. The new housekeeper stuck it in the freezer.
”When I got up on Thanksgiving Day and found the turkey in the freezer, I got so mad that I slammed it on the basement floor, right at her feet,”
Vanderwarker says. This year there will be another fresh turkey-and another housekeeper.
SLIPPERY TURKEYS
Dropped turkeys are the bane of Helena Appleton, a Near North Side artist: ”Those darn turkeys are so slippery. My mother and I have dropped a number of them. We just laugh, dust off the turkey and keep going,” she says. ”No one knows.”
And no one knows fear like a new wife making her first Thanksgiving Day feast for the relatives. ”I did a trial run,” says Appleton. A month before, she made the whole meal, from the table to the turkey and fresh green beans, painfully forced through a French slicer.
Which meal was better? ”The first,” Appleton says quickly. ”My biscuits rose right the first time. On the actual Thanksgiving Day, I served the biscuits anyway, hoping no one except my grandmother would make a nasty comment. And she did. Of course, she did.”
Indeed, family tension can be harder to handle than a slippery turkey.
”In any family reunion, when people who are not normally living together get together, there is potential for stress,” says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. ”Food is good for greasing the wheel.
”Shared food has been one of the universal mechanisms of solidarity. There used to be dining at almost every crucial moment: births, marriages, funerals. The reason is simple: If you sit and eat for four to five days without getting up, you will feel a lot more chummy with these people you would otherwise hate,” Csikszentmihalyi says.
14TH CENTURY FEAST
”At a 14th Century coronation of the Archbishop of York, the food included 120 porpoises, as well as thousands of pigs and chickens. The cake had an orchestra of 12 people playing inside,” he says.
”The reason for the spread is that there was a lot of tension. One bishop is chosen archbishop; the other bishops are disappointed. So you have a banquet, and you eat until you don`t care and you just want to go home,” he says.
”Thanksgiving dinner is really a very small form of these feasts, but in our society it is one of the biggest,” Csikszentmihalyi says. ”It serves the same purpose: getting people together to feel good and satisfied.”
Of course, when you blow it, relatives never forget. Or forgive.
”My worst year was when my parents left us kids with the neighbors for Thanksgiving,” says Jana Franklin, a Dallas-based travel consultant. ”Their wedding anniversary fell on the same day as Thanksgiving, so they went away to Lake Tahoe.”
”I knew they were having a wonderful time. And we were left with these neighbors I hated. To this day I don`t like those people. And I never forgave my parents for that,” Franklin says.
NO FAMILY INVOLVEMENT
”My best year didn`t involve family,” Franklin says. ”We were a bunch of 22-year-olds working for Braniff Airlines in Kansas City and we were too poor to go home.”
”Everyone brought only what they liked. We did have turkey-almost everyone liked that. But no sweet potatoes. No green beans. We had lemon meringue pie. Someone brought a wonderfully brandied cake you could get drunk over. Lots and lots of mashed potatoes. Lots and lots of homemade rolls. Lots of gravy. Things like that,” Franklin says.
”We did it up right: dressy clothes, crystal glasses and hearty burgundy from a jug,” Franklin says.
ETHNIC TOUCHES
This year, Franklin has the option of joining her sister, D`Nette Rose of Cedar Hill, Tex., at yet another feast the Pilgrims would never recognize.
”I have a Japanese mother-in-law, and my sister is Filipino. Everyone brings a dish and our Thanksgiving runs from turkey with corn bread dressing to gyoza, which are Japanese egg rolls, thin beef on bamboo skewers, sushi and a Japanese salad with shrimp and shredded cabbage,” Rose says.
”The food is anything but traditional, and the meal lasts from 11 in the morning to 6 in the evening. It is longer, more fun and more casual than when I was a kid. But we have to be done by 6 p.m. because then the women have to go play bingo. Every day. Even Thanksgiving,” Rose says.
For about five years, Appleton used to leave blustery Chicago with her family and spend Thanksgiving in Hawaii or the Caribbean. But the last four Thanksgivings have been at home.
”The kids said it was really important to them. But they said I didn`t have to kill myself making dinner. The tradition is being here as a family, being all together,” Appleton says.
Indeed, the food is not necessarily the most important element of the feast: ”Wouldn`t it be fun,” McCraith says, ”to have a meal that makes you thankful for what you have, rather than what the Pilgrims ate or your mother always made for Thanksgiving.” –
