November is the busiest time for cooks and food writers – we cannot get enough of complicated planning, and scribbling bulleted lists, and charting menus and spread sheets for the Thanksgiving meal where we will gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. I amaze myself by discovering how much time I can waste thinking about place cards. Place cards! There will be just six of us for Thanksgiving dinner this year, two of whom will be under 12 years old, and one of whom does not yet read. They will not appreciate the carefully inked swirls of calligraphic artistry. It might be best to just simplify.
Every year we like to remember Thanksgivings past. Like the year when we ran out of chairs, and the children’s table was children sitting cross legged on the floor around a coffee table. And how, like clockwork, we almost always manage to forget to cook the green beans until after the parade of food from the kitchen to the table has begun. Did you know that you can make the mashed potatoes ahead of time? Traditionally we always have to waylay a couple of mashed potato workers, one who peels with aplomb, and another who mashes with glee. What if I make the potatoes myself on Wednesday, and re-heat them on Thursday? Oooh – the time space continuum in the kitchen has been radically expanded!
One Thanksgiving when we lived in Florida we ate outside, at tables we had rigged up with sheets of plywood and saw horses, because it was a pleasant temperature and we had lots of friends there with their lots of wriggling children. We fired up the fairy lights and moved the stereo speakers onto the back patio. It was an adventure to eat formally, with candles and sterling, with the ancestral china, and tinkling crystal outside, but not one wriggling child fell into the pool. It was a good meal, and so memorable.
It is too early to know if outdoor dining is feasible for Thanksgiving this year. Thanksgiving dinner is rarely impromtu, or improvised because we are already scrawling our shopping lists here in the first week of November. But I have to say that the al fresco Thanksgiving was delightful, with zephyr breezes and elbow room and bright twinkly lights. Everyone who attended brought a covered dish and a chair. If we try it again this year we know that we can skip using the good china, just this once, and break out the finest of paper plates. It will be dark-ish, after all. And maybe we can think about grilling a turkey breast instead of risking life and limb by deep frying an entire bird – and you can spend even more time outdoors: Grilled Turkey Added bonus: the white wine will chill itself, especially in red Solo cups.
So start your low-key Thanksgiving planning. Be innovative. You don’t have to go outside. Skip our green bean tradition and try forgetting to roast the Brussels sprouts this year. Sprouts Bake a spice cake, and swirl on the cream cheese icing, instead of doing elaborate calligraphy. The under-twelves will love it. Spiced Pumpkin Layer Cake
If you are going to be a smaller family unit this year, how about making your life even easier? Roast a chicken. You can still eat drumsticks: Roasted Chicken Then splash out for some really nice wine, and assuage your guilt by making a labor intensive and decadent dessert involving choux pastry, chocolate and creme pat: Decadence Or pick up a pumpkin pie at Costco – who will know? The five-year-old won’t tell.
A dose of romance could liven up a more modest Thanksgiving: lots of candles and a brace of Cornish game hen, wild rice, a green salad and store-bought chocolate eclairs, Beaujolais Nouveau, and fewer dishes to wash. Take a nice meandering walk in the cold, and have an evening streaming comforting Diane Keaton films. Find something to make yourselves happy. And in 20 years, you’ll have a story about the nice, simple Thanksgiving when nothing went awry.
“The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.”
― Marie Kondō
Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.
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