Thanksgiving(s)
As a child I know that I would alternate spending Thanksgivings between my mom’s family and my dad’s family. I have no early memories of the ones I spent with my mom’s family, and in comparing notes with my mom, I think this is because there wasn’t a specific Thanksgiving tradition on that side of the family, even in terms of which people we spent the holiday with, or which dishes we had, that would have imprinted on my young brain through years of repetition. Instead my early Thanksgiving memories are all from my dad’s family.
The very earliest image of Thanksgiving I can conjure is set in the big apartment that my dad’s parents lived in right after selling the big family home in Mill Valley, when I was around six years old. My memories in that old apartment are very fragmented, identifiable mostly by the fact that they don’t take place in any other location that I can identify with more certainty, but one of them is very distinct and must have been at Thanksgiving: being served canned cranberry sauce that was cut into little half-rounds. In later years I became more of a fan of the homemade kind, where whole cranberries simmer down into delicious chunks through festive alchemy, but I remember loving the canned stuff at that young age and don’t begrudge anyone’s preference for it.
My next few Thanksgiving memories are all set in the Pac Heights two-bedroom apartment that my grandma moved to after my grandpa died. The kitchen in that place was big enough for multiple people to be cooking at once, and for those big holiday feasts the entire assembled family (my grandma, my dad, and usually two of his three siblings) would collaborate, each volunteering a set of dishes and then carefully coordinating what dishes could overlap in the oven, who had dibs on which burner, and so on. I remember one year my contribution was to sit on the couch with a mixing bowl of heavy cream and make fresh whipped cream (I got it into my head that it would be fun to do it by hand, but there was no whisk handy, so I used a fork; it must have taken me close to half an hour).
The Thanksgiving staples were a given: roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, rolls. Also a salad and generally some kind of roast vegetable, like sweet potato, which was considered adequately sweet without being covered in marshmallow, as I’ve seen on some other holiday tables. No casseroles or jello salads.
The star of the show as far as I was concerned was the pie. On one memorable occasion everyone who had brought pie(s) set them out on the sideboard after the main meal and we had as many pies as there were people. Pumpkin and pecan were always present, and sweet potato pie, which I don’t encounter nearly as often these days, was another frequent favorite. Sometimes the pumpkin pie would have rum in it, which I did not care for at the time; I would probably feel differently today. Fruit pies were less typical, but I remember my uncle making a cranberry mincemeat pie one year that I’ve since tried to approximate in my own kitchen more than once.
I was in high school when my grandma moved to a smaller one-bedroom apartment in North Beach, where the tradition continued unbroken, although as available space decreased there was a little bit more jostling for use of the kitchen. There was no separate dining room in that apartment, so after the meal was prepared, we’d reconfigure the kitchen table into a dining table by pulling it into the center of the room and adding the leaves. After I finished college and moved into my own apartment in the East Bay, with my own kitchen, I dedicated myself to the piemaker’s craft. I would stay up the night before baking multiple pies, and then carefully pack them to ensure they didn’t go sliding onto the floor of my car as I hunted for scarce parking on the steep slopes of Telegraph Hill. I credit my lifelong skills at stickshift driving and parallel parking largely to the practice I gained as a novice driver in North Beach; when the only spot available in a one mile radius requires you to parallel park with a foot of clearance, on a steep hill, on the wrong side of the street, you figure out how to make it work, even if it takes you twenty minutes of careful readjusting and deep calming breaths.
After my grandma no longer felt up to hosting the Thanksgiving spread, the torch was passed to her youngest child, my uncle, in his Russian Hill studio apartment. My uncle would invite friends as well as family, ranging from current coworkers to grade school chums that he remains close to. On some of those Thanksgivings I swear he packed twenty people into that room, crowded around two folding tables, with some of us sitting on his futon, and festivities continuing after the meal with digestifs and board games. Cooking remained a communal affair to the extent possible; on the last Thanksgiving before my grandma passed away at the age of 89, she was in my uncle’s galley kitchen preparing her famous turkey stuffing.
Having traced that thread of all those Thanksgivings with my dad’s family that go back forty-ish years, I feel like the Thanksgiving tapestry isn’t complete without going back and recalling some other memorable feasts from more recent times.
The ongoing Thanksgiving tradition that looms largest in my memory, second only to all those family gatherings, is the annual Thanksgiving potluck at my old job, which was typically the Friday before Thanksgiving. I was at that job for a long time, and by my reckoning I must have celebrated around fifteen pre-Thanksgivings this way. In the early years we’d set up tables in the big all-hands meeting space in the office; in the later years, when we could no longer fit enough dining tables inside for everyone, we set up tents in the parking lot, with serving tables in the garage. The turkey was always provided by the company and cooked on site, courtesy of deep fryers operated skillfully and safely (outdoors, well away from anything flammable) by our IT team. All of the other food was potlucked, with a signup to ensure a spread across food categories, and every single person brought something. I would try to get at least a bite of as many dishes as possible, but tasting everything was an impossibility with a menu that large.
No work happened on those days; the prep for the meal started in the morning, and there was a snack/wine/cocktail hour (the younger generation may gasp to hear that in those days, nobody saw anything strange about day-drinking at the office on a special occasion) before the main feast was served for lunch. Pre-mixed cocktails were dispensed from back-mounted tanks. Homemade chocolate truffles were breaded and fried to serve as hors d’oeuvres while the turkey rested. Once we were all seated at the table, the meal lasted for hours as people lingered to refill their wine glasses and chat with their neighbors before going back for seconds and sometimes thirds. At some point the CEO would give a holiday speech to the assembled crowd, often wearing a ceremonial turkey outfit, and then walk down the long tables personally handing out Christmas bonus checks like Mr. Fezziwig, a privilege he preferred to reserve to himself rather than delegating to managers (although I think practicality eventually required that tradition to bend a little). By the time the meal was done and the bonuses in everyone’s hands, there were a couple of hours left in the hypothetical work day, just enough time to groggily square away anything urgent before starting the weekend and preparing to do it all over again with the family the following Thursday.
More recently still we have what I think of as the pandemic Thanksgivings:
Me, my wife, my mother, and my siblings (+1) gathering for an outdoors Thanksgiving in our modest city backyard, with space heaters and tabletop firepits to stay warm in our socially-distanced tables. Takeout turkey provided by Tommy’s Joynt, which was unprepared for the demand and had a line down Geary halfway to Franklin.
Us hosting my dad and all his siblings (+1) at our place, just as the spike from the Delta variant was dying down, everyone was vaccinated, and we felt cautiously okay with having an indoors gathering. This was my first time cooking a whole turkey; I smoked it in the Kamado and it came out great.
Us hosting my mom and brother; that year I did the turkey in the oven with an overnight dry brine and it came out great again. Two for two!
For my daughter’s first Thanksgiving (pre-solid-food), we had planned to join my dad’s family at my aunt’s place, but instead we all got Covid and stayed home. Boo! Turkey once again provided by Tommy’s Joynt.
Penultimately, for my daughter’s second Thanksgiving, we joined my sister and her partner in New Orleans for a mostly-vegan Thanksgiving with a group of about half a dozen of their friends. The food and company were great, but that Thanksgiving was most memorable for being the occasion where my daughter really started walking on her own (the historical record will show that her first steps had technically been a week or so earlier, but she didn’t appear to realize she’d done it, and it took her until New Orleans to start experimenting in earnest).
And finally (as of the time of this writing), our most recent Thanksgiving, which is what inspired me to start reminscing about traditions, was back at my uncle’s Russian Hill apartment. It was family-only this year, not nearly as crowded as some of the feasts of years past; none of us have as much energy as we did even six years ago to put together a giant spread, I suppose, and I expect some of his usual crew of friends are less available due to having moved away and/or started their own families. Nevertheless, the entire clan was able to gather around the table, including, for the first time, my daughter, whom I was happy to see getting her introduction to roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and pecan pie in a feast that felt solidly connected to all those of my own childhood.