Thanksgiving in Life Stages
I have two favorite holidays. One holiday is Passover and the other is Thanksgiving. Both holidays are my favorites mainly because I love the food that comes with those holidays.
As this is the time of the year for Thanksgiving, I have reflected on the fact that Thanksgiving occupied four different time periods of my life. The first was my childhood and early adulthood which were mostly around family and very traditional foods. None of the occasions stands out in my mind. I suppose they were fun with aunts, uncles and cousins. The food was the traditional fair with side dishes I don’t or won’t eat anymore, like Jello molds!
The second phase was my life in Los Angeles and my trips every year up to San Francisco for Thanksgiving at my cousins’ home. These were clearly my best years of Thanksgiving for food, ambience, love and friendship (see my https://medium.com/@paristulips/creation-of-my-gastronomic-landscape-eaeec6cc03ef). I looked forward to these Thanksgivings every year and miss them terribly. But some of the people who were at those Thanksgiving dinners are no longer with us. Or the children, now grown, have their own families to celebrate with. I never had children. So I don’t fall in that category.
The third phase were my years in France where Thanksgiving was difficult to recreate as the French don’t necessarily have the same ingredients that we use here in the US and whole turkeys were hard to come by that time of year. One year, we did have a capon, which I must admit was quite juicy and delicious. “Stuffing” to the French is farce and it usually refers to lots of meat being stuffed in a vegetable like peppers or in meat like veal. American stuffing is a whole different thing to French people and doesn’t sound particularly appealing to them.
In Paris, there were stores that carried Anglophone food. But it was still hard to capture the essence of Thanksgiving tastes. As I didn’t live in Paris, it was too much trouble to search for these products. In all honesty, I have never prepared my own Thanksgiving. I was always a guest somewhere. I couldn’t imagine cooking for Thanksgiving. So for me, the holiday came and went like any other day.
Other Americans in and around Paris staged Thanksgiving dinners. But as I was not part of the organizations of Americans who lived in Paris, I was not involved with the people who took on the challenge of creating an American Thanksgiving. I remember once reading about a American woman living in Paris who brought back a frozen turkey in her luggage on her return from the States. Not sure that security would let that pass today.
My husband, who knew how much I loved this holiday and missed my times in San Francisco with my cousins, would sometimes suggest we go to the States for a visit for these feasts. The feast my cousin, Bob referred to, “as the one day of the year that Americans eat better than the French”. And that we did. Those Thanksgivings put a whole different slant on the traditional Thanksgiving food. They were more like a “Franco-American version” of Thanksgiving. Many of the recipes used by my cousin were from the now extinct “Gourmet Magazine”. Those Thanksgivings will forever stand out in my mind with such marvelous memories.
Now we are in the fourth stage of my celebrations of Thanksgiving. This phase is probably the most depressing. Over the years we have slowly repatriated to the US. First we were “snowbirds” coming to our condo in Arizona for the months of October through May. But little by little we were staying in the US longer and only going back to France for maybe 2 or 3 months of the year maximum. We were in Arizona for the holidays of Thanksgiving and sometimes Christmas. We have friends here in Arizona. But at holiday time they are having Thanksgiving with their own family. We have no immediate family here. My older sister passed away about 2 years and my younger sister is on the east coast. The only immediate family is my sister’s husband. We invite my brother-in-law to come to our home for all the Thanksgiving fixings, compliments of Whole Foods. I kind of think of it as a “Charley Brown Thanksgiving”.
I so long for a Thanksgiving with lots of people, conversation and wonderful food, with contributions by all. But I am afraid I may not see that anymore in my lifetime. My good times at Thanksgiving have been “gobble, gobbled up”.
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