Thankful thoughts
As I write this, it’s beginning to feel like autumn. The foliage is slowly turning. People lucky enough to have wood-burning fireplaces scent the air for all passing. At which point I always tell my husband, “We’ll have our own fireplace…someday.”
I’m thankful we both have optimism.
As to the holiday approaching on the last Thursday in November, I’ve always had mixed feelings about it. Around our Italian-American table, the famed “wedding soup” was first, followed by lasagne, or some other pasta course.
But by the time the turkey appeared on my mom’s table, it was some type of afterthought. It wasn’t until my college years that I stripped away the beginning Italian courses. With Mom, uninterested in cooking large meals, I brought it down to essentials.
A roasted squash soup, a colorful salad, turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts in bacon … you know…what my WASP friends told me their mother made. Neither my mother nor my sister would let me make the creamed onions.
Speaking of creamed onions, I’m also thankful for a memory I have from a long-ago Thanksgiving. My venerable English teacher, Mrs. Boice, a “dyed in the wool Presbyterian” and minister’s wife, shared her menu. Most of her students were not WASPs. Many were Black students; the rest of us were of Italian or Irish-Catholic descent.
“Well, there’s turkey, of course, and the Brussels sprouts,” she was interrupted by one student saying, “gross,” “there’s always pumpkin pie. Oh, and you can’t forget the creamed onions.”
Here was where the room erupted into an ecstatic, teenage booming reply of, “Eww! Creamed onions.”
At my college-age Thanksgivings, I made one concession, an homage, if you will: I served homemade sweet potato gnocchi in sage and butter as a side dish. We liked our American Thanksgiving so much we decided to try it again at Christmas. A virtual repeat of the same menu.
“You know,” Mom said, putting her napkin down after Christmas dinner, “let’s never do that again.”
“I know. They make this in November, then repeat it less than 30 days later,” I opined. “All that work a second time? Never again.”
Of course Thanksgiving is now a controversial holiday. Not as controversial as Columbus Day, which friends from back East, then all living in Portland, renamed it Fiorello la Guardia Day some years ago. But, most importantly, we really just wanted an excuse to get together and eat meatballs.
But, I digress.
Here, out West, I was surprised to hear my Indigenous friends at work actually take part in it.
“Well, we eat a nice dinner but … we’re not super into it.”
“We go to the casino for the buffet. But it’s just another day off.”
“I like turkey. Not Pilgrims. So, we call it Turkey Day.”
But what really amuses me about Thanksgiving in New Mexico is the influence of Spanish and Mexican food on the menu. This creates a holiday enriched with culinary accents akin to the lasagne and wedding soup from my childhood.
“Oh, we have turkey tamales,” a woman told me last year.
“We make sopapillas, and tacos, and enchiladas with ground turkey and plenty of spices. We don’t really like turkey,” another friend said, wrinkling her nose.
I’m also thankful people here openly admit they don’t “like turkey.”
What else am I thankful for? Oh. I got my New Mexico ID card, and my voter registration was finalized this summer. Our garden produced more than we thought it would, and hopefully the soil will be fully restored to good health next year.
I’m also thankful my in-laws don’t, after grace, go around the room asking, “What are you thankful for?” My ex-husband’s family in Florida did this, and it was a means to brag about a new car, a promotion, a handbag even, or some other “thing.” While I liked eating Thanksgiving dinner by the pool in my former brother-in-law’s McMansion*, I did not like the mad rush the host, hostess, and their children made to get to Target for the Black Friday deals.
(*Which, of course, I didn’t really like. It was gray and white, and cold. Like the owners.)
Another thing I am especially thankful for is … purely me. At my register recently, a minister told me his profession.
“Oh, reverend. You’re in great hands. My parish priest is my customer. And he…”
But then, to the right of my register, I spotted a nun.
Not one of those business casual nuns.
She was in a full-on habit. And, clearing the column in front of me, she asked me in a thick Nigerian accent, “Excuse me, sir, do you know where the lingerie department is?” before clearing things up, so my imagination did not run wild, “I’m looking for a full slip.”
Do you know what I have always wanted to do in my retail job? Tell a nun where to find the lingerie department!
I texted friends and ran around the store telling people, “There is a nun, a real live nun in the lingerie department.”
To which several people responded, “I love this for you.”
And this, dear readers, is the story I will share at Thanksgiving Dinner.
