The first Thanksgiving I can remember, I threw up five minutes before the annual family picture. I’m forever immortalized on Grandma’s wall with a napkin in my hand and secondhand mashed potatoes on my shoes.
The trend of bad Thanksgivings only continued from there — bad, of course, only in the warmest sense of the word. There was the year the dog took a dump in the back seat of the car, the year the apple pie fell out the back of it and, more recently, the time the bumper fell off the front. That year, we bought as many bags of sliced bread as rural Pennsylvania could supply, using the twist-ties as car parts and the bread as unrefined hors d’oeuvres.
Each year, though, there was always Thanksgiving. No matter where we were coming from or what state we made it to, the family was always there to faithfully gather around the table, drink too much wine and eat the cold mashed potatoes Grandma ordered from Wal-Mart.
Until this year. On Thursday, when 18 of the people I love most in this world sit down to feast, I’ll be the face on the iPad.
The British don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. They hardly even understand it. To them, it’s one of these enigmatic American traditions, something they hear about but never quite acknowledge.
“What is it, again?” a friend of mine asked when I first arrived. “Why do you have that?”
At the end of October, my boss asked me if I wanted a day off the next week. “It’s Thanksgiving, isn’t it?”
More recently, when I explained the traditional feast to the man sitting beside me at work, the grouchy South Londoner scoffed. “It just sounds like another Christmas,” he said with a shrug. “Typical greedy Americans.”
Curious as they are about the holiday, they don’t get it. I could shout the merits of November turkey and stuffing and ice-cold football games until my face turned blue, with each stubborn Brit remaining secure in the fact that his country has the cultural advantage of a wintertime where Christmas is king and decorations go up before Halloween.
In my family, Thanksgiving was always a milestone. We had the bulk of the year already behind us: another summer gone, a new school year underway. The fall was our time for transition and new starts, but no new job or significant other meant much until it’d been validated by the rest of the family. Nothing felt real until the dishes had been served and the cousins had been ushered into the front row.
