Annual Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving Dinner

To Be Thankful Requires Humility

To be thankful for anything much at all requires humility, I believe. I have little enough of it; in fact, I have a dichotomy common to alcoholics, and that is a combination of both arrogance and self-loathing. Hardly conducive to genuine humility. Another subject almost certainly.

There is never enough more. It is an almost constant desire in the human spirit.

It was not until late in life when I heard a definition of Nirvana, the Eastern concept of serenity, bliss, or simply peace. This definition — and I’ve forgotten where I read it — was prefaced with a quote from (I’m almost sure, but by no means certain) the Buddha/Siddhartha Gautama (in his later version of himself), the ultimate master of this business; that quote: “A man could be born a blind leper in a ring of fire and know only Nirvana.” The definition that followed was to the effect that “Nirvana is a state of wanting nothing, rejecting nothing.” This, to the western mind at any rate, is quite a trick.

Gratitude — or perhaps my most dramatic introduction to the concept, along with its genuine, unsuspected utility to a material-oriented mind — came in an embarrassing (I’m tempted to say humiliating, but what I really mean is “humbling”) way.

I was temporarily homeless; not for long, but long enough. I had wet clothing from having passed out on a lawn with a sprinkler timer. Drenched, I was freezing and miserable in, I think, November. Shivering, I lay under someone’s stairway in Hillcrest. Pneumonia was a looming possibility, if not hypothermia. At just past dawn, the sky a kind of dirt, salt, and ash, a man descended the above staircase with an armload of clothes. All dry. All my size. Exactly. If I did not weep, I seem to remember doing so. I thanked the man. Then I did something atypical for me at the time: I prayed.

It is far from my intention to preach, to convert anyone, or influence the agnostic; all I can honestly tell you is that from that moment on, having expressed real gratitude (and that’s what it was), my life began to improve, by increments but undeniably. It was as if I had uttered a heartfelt invocation to a power greater than my considerable ability to misuse my free will. A god or God — as I’ve come to spell it.

This is to say nothing of my ability to completely space on gratitude, usually by indulging in self-pity and despair, each of which is the opposite of gratitude. All that comes to mind here is a quote from C.S. Lewis (yes, the Narnia author), who in quite another book pointed out that “There are only two types of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ ” This latter allowance of the Deity (if you don’t mind the word) is Hell of a self-engineered type — and I don’t believe there are many other types. Well, maybe. Even quite possibly, but I am no theologian.

As for Thanksgiving and saying a more elaborate grace over the turkey, and the rest of it, it is not necessarily my idea of gratitude. It qualifies, but I once heard a man say to a whining youth, with regard to the youth’s bad luck and poverty and what might be done about it: “Start with gratitude for what you do have; the smallest things. Your life, your breath, your socks — even if you have holes in them — you have socks. It’s a place to start; a way to open the door a crack to principles larger than yourself, and that’s all you need: the door open a crack.” At the risk of sounding like a religious maniac (you have no way of knowing how funny that is), I have found this door-crack principle to be very real.

I have heard much of “gratitude lists” and the like, and they don’t sound like bad ideas, not at all; but it seems to me that one can open that crack in the door with an observation of one’s own breathing. Then maybe a raising of the face to the sunlight — or the eyes to the stars.

— John Brizzolara

This Year, We’re Staying Local

It’s late October and I am looking for a turkey, which is ironic. A decade ago, when I was a SWF, all I could find were turkeys. For a while, I even dated one. But now that I am looking for a real bird, there are none to be found.

Stan Glen, supervisor for Siesel’s Meats, laughs when I phone him to ask if I can order a local, raised-in-San Diego turkey for Thanksgiving. “You’re about 40 years too late,” he tells me. “But we have some Diestel free-range turkeys you can order for the holidays.”

I sigh. “I need a native,” I say, and there’s a pause on the other end of the line.

“This Thanksgiving, everything I make is going to be raised or grown in San Diego County,” I explain. I feel so virtuous saying this. So green. This year, I am putting down my fork and picking up a cause: I’m thinking globally, eating locally, and carrying all my ingredients in reusable shopping bags. Somewhere, Michael Pollan is smiling.

“There used to be a huge turkey industry centered in Ramona,” says Stan, “but the last Ramona-brand turkey was sold in 1994. Now you can’t get any meat that’s been raised in San Diego County.”

Dick Gilmore, customer-service representative at Siesel’s, has been in the meat business since 1958. He tells me that about 35 years ago, the health department wanted to cut down on the flies, because they thought it hurt the tourist industry. “So the head of the health department at the time — J.B. Askew — put so many restrictions on the growers, they all went out of business. Now you can’t just get in a car and go buy a turkey for the holidays like you think you oughta. They chased them all away.”

Defeated, I call local chef Trey Foshee of George’s at the Cove for help. A big proponent of sustainable farming, Trey bases his menu on what’s local and in season. “It’s spiny lobster season right now,” he tells me. “So for Thanksgiving, a no-brainer would be spiny lobster with uni butter.” Uni, Trey explains, is another name for sea urchin. “I think uni from San Diego is some of the best in the world. You would be challenging the norm to serve it for Thanksgiving dinner if you were going to invite your in-laws, for example. But when it’s fresh, it’s delicious.” He tells me to go to Catalina Offshore Products, which is one of the biggest uni suppliers in the world.

They are located on Lovelock Street, at the dead end of a narrow alley full of warehouses. My nine-month-old son is with me, asleep, so I lug his car seat up the stairs to the building. The office is smaller than I expect, with a few cubicles, a small TV on the wall playing a sushi slideshow, and a fax machine in the corner. A small Asian woman sits at a desk. At first, I think I’m in the wrong place, but after a few minutes, a tall, dark-haired man walks out of the warehouse doors. I explain that I am looking for lobster and uni, and he shakes his head. “You need to order one day in advance,” he says in a French accent. He holds up his hands. “We already are out today.” He introduces himself as Alain Leroy and immediately gives me an uni tutorial. He shows me photos of sea urchins on the walls and tells me how they are cracked open, the long tongues of roe removed carefully, quality graded, and then shipped all over the world. “Come with me,” he says. “I will give you a tour. Leave the baby with Keiko — she has seven kids.”

Keiko Sellers rolls her eyes at Alain, tells me she only has five children, and then smiles at my sleeping son. Already, they have charmed me.

The warehouse is immaculate. Men in white coveralls are hosing the floor, and immense white tanks, the size of small swimming pools, line the room. Alain reaches into one of the tanks and pulls out a shrimp as long as my hand. “You can eat these raw,” he tells me. “It’s like tasting the ocean.” He reaches into another tank and pulls out the biggest lobster I have ever seen. Its body twists in Alain’s hand, and its legs scurry through the air.

“If I bought one of these,” I begin, “would you clean it for me?”

“No. You have to do it yourself.” Alain grins and then shrugs. “Some people, they freeze the lobster first to put them to sleep. But me, I am cruel. I just drop it into a steaming pot and quick, put on the lid.” I must wince because he adds, “But I don’t recommend it for a date. The women, they go, ‘Eeww.’ ” Alain gives a little shriek and waves his hands by his head. I know exactly what he means.

Despite the fact that I need to do some serious research on how to prepare a lobster, I place my order and drive away feeling my spirits lift. Where else can you get lobster and free babysitting?

What worries me a little is where I am going to get the butter. According to the San Diego Farm Bureau, there are only five working dairies in San Diego County. Only four have working phone numbers, and only one calls me back: Dave van Ommering of Van Ommering Dairy and Pumpkin Patch in Lakeside. He tells me they have over 200 cows on their farm, but their milk is shipped to a co-op out in Artesia. “Our goal is to have a creamery someday on the farm, but with the dairy industry losing money for eight years straight, we’re just treading water right now.” He says he and his wife Brenda are lucky to have what they do. “You’d be crazy to start a dairy in San Diego now. The regulations make it impossible.” He adds that Hollandia Dairy has a creamery in San Diego County, but their cows are out in the Imperial Valley.

This isn’t my only dilemma. In addition to lobster, my menu includes pumpkin soup, roasted root vegetables, mashed potatoes, and applesauce — all found in abundance in San Diego County. What’s tripping me up is that I need to make these dishes without salt, pepper, sugar, and wheat (so no pie — pumpkin or apple — which might just cause my husband to find himself a girlfriend for the holidays). I have already tried (and failed) to make my own cornmeal from dried-out local corn, so there goes my hope for stuffing. And since there is virtually no dairy industry in San Diego, I have to abandon my plan of serving homemade ice cream for dessert. Honestly, I didn’t think it would be quite this hard. Is it so wrong to want my house to smell like pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving?

For the time being, I try to console myself with vegetables and head out to Seabreeze Organic Farm in Del Mar. According to the directions, the farm is right off Carmel Valley Road, past Changes Plastic Surgery and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. Predictably, a Beemer is on my tail as I turn onto Arroyo Sorrento past a set of McMansions and then up the steepest, narrowest hill I have seen since moving from San Francisco.

As I crest the hill, I gasp at the sea of tract homes spread out below. And yet, right in front of me is most definitely a farm, balancing precariously on the side of the hill. I drive through an open gate and a corgi trots out to meet me, while a flock of chickens spring out from a hill of flowers. I start walking to a fence, and a white turkey wanders over, his red wattle swaying. I have already been told — in no uncertain terms — that these birds are not for eating, and as if reading my mind, the turkey glares at me.

Down the hill, lettuces and root vegetables grow in neat rows decorated by tall wildflowers, long-necked squash dangle down from trellises, and near the bottom of the hill, basil, chard, and strawberries grow in towers that look like mini-skyscrapers. I find Stephanie Coughlin, the farm’s owner, near a bed of lettuce. She is taking photos for her weekly CSA — short for community-supported agriculture — by which individuals pay $40–$60 a week in exchange for a delivery of fresh produce harvested that very day. Although her farm is less than two acres, Stephanie supports about 130 families.

“This is a completely independent small farm,” Stephanie tells me proudly as she pulls her red hair back from her face. “I don’t take anything from anyone.” She steps away, tending to her vegetables, peering at leaves and flowers. She moves constantly. “The deck is very stacked against the small farmer.” She takes another photo. “I tend to be blunt, but the consumer is really pretty hypocritical. They pick up one book and expect perfection from this beleaguered farmer who’s been doing this for years and years.”

Oh jeez, I think, I am such a fraud. Me with my Prius and turkey-free holiday, moaning that my CSA doesn’t have cranberries. Stephanie’s right. I just want what I want when I want it, seasonality be damned. Really, I’m about as sustainable as a plastic bag.

Buck up, I tell myself as I leave the farm. At least grapes grow in San Diego. And if I’m not serving turkey on Thanksgiving, we’re going to need a bottle of wine on the table. I head east, towards Orfila Vineyards and Winery, which stretches out in front of the rocky detritus of the Escondido mountains. The tasting room is in an old building covered with ivy, and inside, it smells like the inside of a wine barrel.

Scott Ledbetter, the tasting-room manger, sets up a generous flight of Orfila’s Rhone-style wines for me to taste, including one that he assures me will be perfect with lobster: The Estate Viognier, “Lotus.” I also come away with a Merlot that will pair well with roasted vegetables, and the 2006 Estate Petite Syrah, which I know my husband will love. Scott assured me that it could make a wonderful sauce for ice cream (sigh) when reduced.

Rain clouds are rolling in as I drive away, and there’s a chill in the air. For the first time this year, it feels like fall, and I realize I am looking forward to Thanksgiving, to my unconventional feast. As the wine bottles clink in the seat next to me, I chastise myself for being so gloomy about what I can’t have this year, instead of focusing on what’s right in front of me. The food that comes from our land and ocean is truly incredible. Lobster and sea urchin. Potatoes, pumpkins, and beets. Olive oil and wine. It will be plenty. It will be much more than enough.

— Pamela Hunt-Cloyd

Eat What the Politicians Feed You

This Thanksgiving, some Americans will be eating turducken, a turkey stuffed with duck that is in turn stuffed with chicken. It started commercially in Louisiana’s Cajun country about 25 years ago, spread to much of the Deep South, and now, in what may be a precursor to Civil War II, is invading the North. Why don’t they call it ducturchic? Or a “multi-bird roast,” as the prissy English do? I will state right now that I will never eat turducken, and if Turkey and Dubai merge and become Turdubai, I shall not invite the Turd ambassador into my home for dinner.

Alas, turducken is being rammed down our throats. For example, while the U.S., Germany, and France are finally trying to thwart their upper-crust citizens’ tax evasion via Swiss tax and secrecy havens, the head of Switzerland’s oldest bank laments that these countries want to “criminalize the elite,” who do the stashing. I say that if the elite commit crimes, they deserve criminal penalties. What’s so radical about that idea?

In the U.S., the Republicans attack President Obama as a socialist because he wants to set up a government health insurance option. But among many repugnant things, the U.S. government, while Republicans were in the White House, took on ownership of American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and part of Citigroup during the fall of 2008. Big business is promoting — and profiting from — corporate socialism. In San Diego it’s called “public-private entrepreneurship.”

During last fall’s crisis, Wall Street’s big investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, officially became bank holding companies, so they could get cut in on the juice that the Federal Reserve was pouring out. Wall Street investment banks should not — repeat, not — be able to get cheap money from the central bank. In capitalist theory, investment banks are supposed to take on risk. The more we bail out financial institutions whose stupid and corrupt risk-takings backfire, the more we guarantee that such behavior will recur. Last year, an angry congressman asked Federal Reserve head Ben Bernanke and former Treasury chief Hank Paulson if Wall Street should apologize to American taxpayers for the mess it created. Neither Bernanke nor Paulson would comment — a clear indication of whose pockets they resided in.

Now banks are taking big risks again while official Washington applauds. Banks are still considered “too big to fail.” World governments, including the U.S., should have told the banks that “too big to fail” is “too big to manage,” and not only that, but “too big, period.” There should have been moves to break up mammoth financial conglomerates and unwind the trillions of dollars of derivatives that brought the world’s financial system to the brink. But it’s now clear that any financial reform will be modest.

A battle is quietly brewing. Job hunters outnumber job openings six to one — an unprecedented ratio. Main Street wants the economy to recover briskly. But if it does, inflation is likely to erupt, because the Treasury and Fed have created so much liquidity. Ergo, Wall Street wants a soft economy so the Fed will keep distilling korn likker to buoy the stock market, even as the economy wilts and Main Street suffers. Washington DC is owned by Wall Street. Whom will our politicians accommodate? Silly child.

Gobble your turducken and shut up.

San Diegans are being instructed to dine on the same cuisine. In March, the media-relations team at the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation sent out a news release taking credit for an article it had planted in the New York Times. First, the story bestowed laudations on Mayor Jerry Sanders for two real-estate developments that had been underway before he took office. Then the Times article asserted that “Sanders, who inherited a city in financial crisis — its water and sewer systems deteriorating, its pensions underfunded and its municipal bond ratings low — has overseen a turnaround that has helped restore the city’s fiscal health.” Nonsense. What turnaround? The pension system is worse off than ever, and so are the sewer and water systems.

Keep in mind that the City of San Diego pours money into that Regional Economic Development Corporation, whose publicity machine boasted about the role it played planting the false story printed by the Times. Nonetheless, in a speech on September 15, the mayor boasted that the Times “reported that San Diego was already a bright spot.” Hmm... Maybe some San Diegans believed it. They helped pay for the propaganda.

Sanders went on to denounce “defeatists” who oppose planned developments that will benefit his friends in the real estate industry: the expansion of the convention center, the replacement of city hall, the building of a library in the ballpark district. The mayor asserted that the projects “will be funded by revenues generated by the projects.” Ulp! That’s what the establishment said about the ballpark, and now it’s a yearly drain. Will the library sustain itself with late-book fines? Or the new city hall with traffic-ticket revenue?

This Thanksgiving, you are being told to eat shiitake mushrooms with your turducken.

— Don Bauder

This Is How It’s Supposed to Be

The kids chased each other around the coffee table in the living room while I helped carry food from the kitchen to the dining room. This is how it’s supposed to be, I thought. Sure, there’s the long weekend, the binging, the warm fuzzies generated by the promise of cold weather and hot cocoa, and the whole gratitude thing; but Thanksgiving, I knew, was all about family.

Because we’d always traveled back East to spend the holiday with my in-laws, this was the first Thanksgiving I’d spent with my family since I’d started dating David six years earlier. It was also the first time as an adult that I could remember not itching to leave as soon as the pie had been served.

Though I’d moved out of my parents’ house when I turned 18, the full weight of adulthood didn’t hit me until I turned 21. That was the year my parents split up. Like a supernova, our family’s core collapsed and then exploded, and I was but one of the scattered fragments. Heather had just married Sean four months earlier; they lived as newlyweds in Mission Hills. Jane moved into a place in City Heights with her future husband, Simon. Jenny had just moved into a dorm at her college near Compton. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in North Park. Mom stayed in the house, the family’s hub in Chula Vista. And Dad had chosen — as the first place he’d ever lived alone — a monastic studio apartment in Point Loma. We were, each of us, for the first time, spinning off into our own orbits.

While adrift out there in the blackness, I gravitated closer to my friends. It’s trite but true — friends are the family we choose for ourselves, and I was in the market for one. Thanksgiving wasn’t the only event to happen on a Thursday — that was also the one night of the week that Club Hedonism packed the rooms at Rich’s in Hillcrest. The year I turned 21, I traded in my fake ID for my real license and looked forward to skipping out on what was certain to be an awkward and fractured family holiday to attend a cohesive celebration with my new family of friends.

Emotions ran high that Turkey Day — my father had only announced his intention to move out two weeks prior to the feast of gratitude. It was understood and accepted that Dad would not be in attendance and that Jane and Simon were leaving early to spend the second half of the day with Simon’s family in Coronado. Those of us who were left didn’t quite know how to be.

The transition from childhood to adulthood can take years. Post–high school, pre-career, my sisters and I were all in that awkward in-between stage; we found it difficult to let go of our established familial labels because we weren’t yet sure how to define ourselves, or each other. I compensated for my inability to find a groove at my mother’s house by inventing a new identity for myself at the club.

After eating enough to fill me up but not to make me pass out (as I was wont to do as a teen on Thanksgiving), I made my exit from my mother’s house. On the drive back to my apartment, I tried to let go of all the tension and uneasiness. Once home, my frown vanished as I applied black eyeliner, red lipstick, and a showgirl’s share of glitter to my face.

At the club, properly dosed with my preferred mix of illegal chemicals for maximum enjoyment, I was welcomed with open arms. This family was consistent; there was no confusion over which role to play, that of rebellious daughter or estranged sister. The rules were simple, and everyone abided by them — have fun or die trying. DJ Jon Bishop kept us on the dance floor, where glow sticks left trails like comets in the dark. Thoughts of my disintegrating home life were replaced by images of rainbows and sparkles; I smiled in ecstasy as I basked in gratitude for being accepted into this dazzling clan.

I thought I could dance forever in my altered state, away from the reality of ruptured families and the ugliness of dawn, the sun having stolen away the magic of the night. But time is a wondrous salve, soothing and healing the sting of old wounds. After a handful of years during which we remained in our own private bubbles, the birth of my nephew — my parents’ first grandchild — seemed to flip a cosmic switch, reversing the gravitational forces on the family from push to pull.

With four children between them, Jane and Heather were drawn back into the familial fold and bonded tighter than before. My parents, though not living together, were on friendly terms, and Dad was welcome and often present for birthday parties, holidays, or any family gathering. It was a delight to see them all together, gathering round the roasted turkey Sean had placed on the table, along with the ultimate family I have chosen for myself, which is David. As we sat to begin our ritual of going around the table and announcing that for which we are grateful, it occurred to me that we were each not just a part of the whole, but also individual and fully realized shining stars.

— Barbarella

Thanksgiving: A Secular Jewish Odyssey

PRELUDE: FAMILY DINNERS

A few months ago, my gardener (unaware of my ancestry) casually said, “Mexico City has too many Jews.” “What’s wrong with Jews?” I asked. “They’re all rich and stingy.” I thought of my grandparents.

When they emigrated to New York, they were even poorer than they’d been in Moscow, albeit safer. Joseph and Gussie made their living renting sidewalk space in front of a delicatessen, where, roofless, they sold pickles in the summer heat, the frigid rains, the winter snows. Gussie got pregnant at least 11 times; five children survived, including four daughters — none of whom could cook worth a damn.

Gussie didn’t have enough mothering to learn how to cook, and neither did her daughters. The Cossacks burned down her shtetl (rural Jewish village), killing the men and older women, raping the younger women and girls. Orphaned at 11, Gussie made her way to Moscow and found a job as a housecleaner for a Christian family. Joseph met and married her when she was 15, enraptured by her long auburn hair and flashing eyes. When their first child, my Aunt Irma, was an infant, they emigrated to New York. Later, Gussie taught Irma some rudimentary cooking (pot roast, chicken soup, roast chicken for holiday feasts). Irma raised her little sisters and taught them what she’d learned of cooking.

Eventually, all the kids scrabbled their way up to the lower middle class. Both grandparents died young, when I was a toddler. I mainly know Grandma Gussie through old black-and-white photos and a few vague memories — her lifting me up and gutturally singing, “Ich hab ah shaine, klaine maidele…” (“I have a pretty little girl”). She scared me. She looked like a witch. She spent more time with my red-haired cousin Marilyn, three months older. (Grandpa Joe made up the difference. Before he died, two months after Gussie, he taught me the alphabet. I was three years, two months old at his death.)

The dead grandparents were Orthodox, their kids secular Jews. Holidays were mainly ritual occasions for the family to get together, not to celebrate anything special beyond the existence of a holiday. Childhood Thanksgivings, like other family dinners, were ordeals. The cooking was marginal — overdone turkey, no stuffing or gravy. The hot-headed Russian Jews were filled with roiling angers that emerged on holidays. Over store-bought dessert, the grownups would start squabbling, and my cousins and I would make ourselves scarce. The last Thanksgiving at my mother’s house, I was 14 and starting to hang out in Greenwich Village. While our relatives argued fiercely about whether or not I was still a virgin, Cousin Marilyn and I snuck off to the bathroom to practice age-appropriate sinning, sharing a cigarette I’d stolen from Aunt Irma’s purse.

TRIUMPH: WHY I’M NOT A CHEF

I taught myself to cook because I’d tasted good food in New York restaurants and wanted to eat like that at home. I craved international variety. I’d cook Szechuanese one night, Peruvian the next, Italian, French, Mexican… After my husband and I moved to San Francisco, as my skills and self-confidence improved, we often threw dinner parties. Almost all our friends were born somewhere else and had no local family, so eventually I began cooking a venturesome series of “orphans’ Thanksgivings,” each year with a different ethnic slant.

No mistake, I had become a competitive cook, ego-involved in culinary dazzlement. On our final orphans’ Thanksgiving, the guest list included someone I was starting to hate — a pretty young thing with huge gazongas, whom I’ll call Abbie. Some of our friends called her “the Groupie” because — lacking any intellectual or creative firepower herself — she threw herself at all the guys in the Bay Area film/food/folk-music cultural mafia. My ex-husband-to-be, not immune to flirtatious gazongas, invited her to Thanksgiving. A temp catering assistant, her contribution to the feast was a “healthy” canned-pumpkin pie in a cardboardy whole-wheat crust made with Wesson oil in lieu of butter. My dessert was an airy blackberry mousse. “How did you get this so smooth?” asked Abbie. “Well, first you purée blackberries in the Cuisi, and then push them through a fine-mesh sieve,” I began. “Oh, wow, that’s too much work,” she answered. (Her catering career was short-lived.)

A greater triumph came post-dessert. Another friend owned a major folk-music record business, headquartered in El Cerrito (north of Berkeley), where the local restaurants were mainly icky chains. Chris had been a frequent dinner guest over the years. “I would like to finance you to open a restaurant near my office,” he said over coffee. “All I want is for you to cook a few of your good peasant dishes every day, nothing fancy.” I thought about it. I looked back to the previous day, hand-whipping 12 pounds of yam flesh with butter, cream, and brown sugar (amended on T-Day with whipped egg whites, then baked to a pouf). My arms were still aching. “No, Chris,” I finally said. “I love cooking, but I don’t know anything about running a restaurant — and especially, I don’t want to stand over a hot stove 15 hours a day. I’m a writer, not a chef.”

DEFEAT: FLAMING TURKEY

Twelve years later: My secret trick for roasting turkey was the brown bag method. You rub the turkey all over with seasonings and softened butter, slide it into a big brown paper grocery bag (atop a rack), and place it in a cold oven. Then you turn the oven on to 500 degrees. An hour later turn it down to 400. Another hour, down to 300. One hour more — done, regardless of the turkey’s size.

It always worked until I had to cook Thanksgiving for my new in-laws. Now I was living with TJ, who’d invited his grown son’s family, complete with a passel of grandkids, to come up from Southern California for Thanksgiving dinner.

Coming from a family even more dysfunctional than mine, TJ routinely got sick for the holidays — from

T-Day to New Year’s. He managed to hang on long enough to do the shopping with me three days before T-Day, then took to bed like a Victorian invalid, fortified by many packs of Coors Light. The cooking fell to me — including alien gringo foodstuffs sacred to his family traditions (e.g., celery stalks filled with fake cheddar from a tube). Gary, Tina, and the kids were staying at a beachside motel a couple of miles from our flat. I advised them to enjoy the wonders of the beach and Golden Gate Park and show up at the house around 4:00 or 5:00 p.m.; I planned to serve dinner at 7:00.

They showed up shortly after noon. Suddenly, I had three strange kiddies calling me Granny and wanting to play with me. And no food ready yet, and TJ barely awake, not up for leading any hikes in the park.

At 3:30, I should have put the brown-bagged turkey in the oven and then turned on the heat. Surrounded by my portmanteau grandkids, I turned on the oven — and then they distracted me. At 3:50, I finally got the turkey into the oven. Remember Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? That’s the temperature at which paper burns. At 4:30, I smelled something funny and opened the oven door. The bag was aflame; so was the turkey and butter grease that had seeped out through it. TJ and Gary grabbed the kitchen fire extinguisher and sprayed foam all over the oven, including the bird, which pasted the burnt brown bag onto the turkey skin.

Dinner was done an hour later than planned, the turkey finished off conventionally. I gave thanks that the yams, mash, stuffing, and veggies were all fine. And under the ruined skin, the turkey meat was marginally edible — really no worse than my mom’s. After dinner, Gary pulled out his new camera and went at it. TJ was camera-shy, as I am, but Gary caught us on the couch, grandkids crawling all over us like a litter of kittens. A few months later, he sent us a copy. In life, I look and act more like my father’s soft-spoken, snarky Polish-Jewish side, but there I was, mahogany-brown hair piled atop my head for comfort while cooking, dark eyes aslant in a grin lifted high by a shelf of prominent Slavic cheekbones — echoing a face mainly remembered through a few old black-and-white photos. Ninety years after my mother’s parents arrived in America, it was Grandma Gussie’s American granddaughter.

— Naomi Wise

The More the Merrier

The bowl of fruit salad sits at eye level in front of me. Through the dimpled red glass, I see the slices of bananas and strawberries, chunks of apples, and grapes resting in the sweetness of their combined juices. More than 30 years later, my mouth still waters and a sense of gleeful anticipation wells up in me as I picture that bowl of fruit salad.

I’ve never asked my mother why, but in my family we’ve always opened our Thanksgiving meal with fruit salad pre-served in individual bowls at each place setting. I must have been very young, three, maybe four years old, when that particular bowl of fruit salad burned its way into my memory, judging from the low angle from which I’m viewing it. Also, there’s only one table in my memory, albeit a long one, with only 20 people around it: my parents and grandma, an aunt, my one younger and 14 older siblings, and I. I couldn’t have been more than four, because by the time I turned five, a sister-in-law and a baby nephew had joined us. The year after that, another nephew and a niece and a brother-in-law would join us. And after that, my already large family grew exponentially as my older brothers and sisters married and had kids. The one big table in the dining room became two tables, then three, then a 60-foot table running through three rooms in my parents’ colossal old house in Pasadena. Soon the 60-footer was joined by satellite tables in the patio and breakfast room, then another long table on the front porch. One turkey became a turkey and ham, then two turkeys and two hams, then three or four turkeys, a few hams, a leg of lamb, and a beef roast or two.

The biggest Grimm Thanksgiving on record was in 2005, when about 250 people showed up at my sister Margaret’s new house. Most of them were directly descended from my parents Bill and Irene Grimm. By that time, they had 15 living children plus their spouses, and they were nearing 120 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. (They now have 126 and 24, respectively.) Almost all of them were there. My 100-year-old grandmother Evelyn Grimm sat at the head of a long table, presiding over four generations of her descendants. The rest of the crowd was friends of the family. The more the merrier has always been our motto. And everyone was merry, except maybe a neighbor whom my sister had invited. Staring at the throng, he asked her with a mixture of disbelief and disgust in his voice, “You mean to tell me most of the people here are related to you?”

“That’s right,” Margaret said.

“There ought to be a law against that,” the neighbor said.

“There is,” she answered, “in China.”

What Margaret’s crotchety neighbor didn’t understand is that Thanksgiving is about being thankful for Life. Think of those Pilgrims. They were grateful for life itself. In my family it’s the same. Every new life born is a cause for rejoicing and giving of thanks to the Author of Life.

Not that there aren’t other blessings for which we give thanks. We live in the nicest corner of the nicest country on earth. Abundance is all around us: an abundance of sunshine, an abundance of wealth — even in these harder times — and an abundance of food. Next time you’re in a supermarket, stop and look around. The overwhelming majority of the world’s people couldn’t even dream of so much food in one place. I wish I could say I am mindful of that every time I walk into Vons, but I can’t. Life’s distractions prevent it. That’s why it’s fitting that on at least one day of the year we take a day off from toil to gather with family and friends to show gratitude for all we’ve been given. This year, I’ll endeavor to keep these thoughts in mind as I plow into my mom’s sausage stuffing, my brother-in-law Pat’s rotisserie lamb, my wife Mary’s unbelievable brown sugar-walnut-coconut sweet potatoes. And I’ll thank God for life and abundance when I take that first bite of fruit salad.

— Ernie Grimm

The Marines Are Coming

Shoulda fixed that thermostat in the oven. Now Carla says she can’t cook no toikey for Thanksgiving and we’ve gotta go out.

“Take me to Cowwonado, pwease?” she says in the über-cute voice she knows I’ll do anything to plug. “We can have Thanksgiving there.”

I check the Hotel Del online. “Ha! Eighty-five dollars each. That suit you?”

“We can go to Clayton’s,” Carla says, calmly. “Mary runs it. Trust me.”

A trolley, a 901 bus, and a bridge later, we’re standing at Tenth and Orange in downtown Coronado. Thar she blows — Clayton’s, single-story white stucco place with red-hooped windows. Mexican-looking, pretty much as it has been for half a century, they say. Carla has kept up with Clayton’s because she comes to town to have her pal Diane do her hair. Guess Diane introduced her to the restaurant’s owner, Mary.

So we cross Orange and wander in to this red and white and cream room. There’s a long, U-shaped counter surrounded by counter stools and a row of red booths on the left. “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock,” shouts Bill Haley from the ancient Seeburg jukebox. I see they still use an old Hamilton Beach milkshake-maker too, and an upright NCR manual cash register.

“Happy Days,” I mumble to Carla.

“What does that make you, the Fonz?” she says. “Let’s get a counter stool by one of the jukebox remotes.”

“Please Be Prepared to Slide the Counter,” says a sign.

“Meaning,” says Carla, “to move along so more people can fit in.”

Two people do sit down right next to us. “Hey, Mary,” Carla calls out — Mary’s down at the kitchen end. “How much for the jukebox?”

“A quarter gets you two songs,” Mary says. She comes up to see us. “It plays 45s. Little kids stare at them and say, ‘Why is this CD so big?’ ”

I slide a quarter into the machine. Carla nubbles the little square buttons. “Just not ‘My Way,’ ” I beg. She hits “Born to Be Wild.” I choose “Tijuana Jail,” since one of the Kingston Trio, Nick Reynolds, hails from this town.

The waitress, Chelsea, brings us menus. It’s early, around 11:00. I’m almost tempted to take the all-day breakfast (heck, pork chops and two eggs only runs $7.50), but no. This is all about next Thursday. Dry run. And yes, they have “Baked Turkey” on the menu, “with dressing, gravy, and cranberry sauce, $8.95.” It also comes with mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and a soup or salad. And “Parker House” rolls.

I go for that, but Carla decides she’ll have a sliced turkey sandwich with coleslaw (she could have had fries) for $5.50.

Soup is a choice of tortilla or French onion. “Have the tortilla,” says Mary. “It’s delicious. Of course, on Thanksgiving, you’ll get butternut-squash soup.”

She’s right about the tortilla soup. It’s got chicken and cheese and the tang of the green cilantro floating in it, and those delicious, crunchy tortilla strips. But the real deal is the turkey. Chelsea brings it on a big oval china plate with four or five generous slices of breast covered in a light brown gravy, plus peas, carrots and corn, and a big fat wad of mash, also topped with gravy, and a pot of cranberry sauce. Love the dressing underneath — bread crumbs, butter, chicken stock, Mary says. And the gravy has a real tang.

“What’s in it?” I ask.

“A little vino,” Mary says, like it’s a state secret.

“This always on the menu?” I ask.

She nods. “We go through two turkeys a day. On Thanksgiving, we’ll cook a lot more. We’re inviting 50 Marines to have lunch here. My three kids and lots of others will be helping out.”

Wow. Turns out they did the same thing last year, only with Navy SEAL trainees.

“Boy, I bet that’s appreciated,” I say.

“It definitely is,” says the guy on my right. Rick. “I’m heading for Afghanistan in a few days,” he says, “and believe me, we appreciate these gestures.”

He’s a Navy commander, in intelligence. Actually a reservist. Works at IBM. He’s already spent a year in Iraq. “I had Thanksgiving 2007 in Baghdad. We ate the turkey, had a good time, and then the mortars started coming in. We hightailed it for the bunkers. And this was in the Green Zone.”

His wife LeAnn is getting ready to say goodbye, again. You can see it in her eyes. “What really helped me last time was I’d send out Halloween things, and Thanksgiving gourds and pumpkins, little Christmas trees, and ornaments. And wherever I was, I would have a card with a flag on it, and I’d pass it around to anybody, and people would write their sentiments, and then I would mail it, so he would feel connected and know how much people cared about him.”

“And I would get it through the mail,” Rick says. “I would wait all day, until I was in my hootch, and then I’d open it up and read it, with no distractions.”

So will this Thanksgiving dinner for Marines mean something to them? “Absolutely,” Rick says. “One time, when I was in Japan, a local American family invited a handful of us over to have Thanksgiving dinner. It’s just a beautiful thing. I’ll always remember that. So these guys, they’re going to love this.”

“Apple pies?” says Mary. “Chelsea and I made two. They’re just out of the oven. Anyone interested?”

Man. I’m starting to remember now. We’ve been here before. It’s a home away from home. Carla and I both order up a slice of pie, “à la mode,” with ice cream ($4.25 each). Oh, yes. It’s hot, with baked Granny Smith apples, and a flaky-and-moist crust that’s…well, I was going to say “to die for.”

“In a way,” says Carla, “that’s exactly what it is. ‘Mom and apple pie’ — why all those boys and girls are willing to go. Whatever the politics.”

“So we’ll come back Thursday?” she asks, as we walk out. “Or would you prefer the $170 Del?”

I wave the little receipt. It says $28.16.

“White flag,” I say.

— Ed Bedford

Eve and Bernice Give Thanks

Eve: What I’m grateful for this Thanksgiving is my hubby Patrick’s bawdy jokes and funky ’70s dance moves and the spontaneous renditions of “Nessun dorma” that burst forth from his soul. My son’s pure joy as he races across the soccer field and the smile as bright as the moon he shines up at me every day. And the way my daughter’s artistic sensibilities overlay everything in her life, from drawing to drama, piano to photography, right down to her graceful ballerina walk.

Bernice: I’m grateful for the 30 minutes I had to wait past my scheduled appointment time to see my newborn’s cardiac doctor at Children’s Hospital. I mean, I hate those little rooms they stick you into as much as the next patient’s mother, but for me, it was 30 minutes to bask in relief while gazing at my baby. I’d recently been to my pediatrician, who reported that she could no longer hear the heart murmur my little girl had displayed at birth. And I’d heard from the EKG tech that everything looked good. I just needed final confirmation from the doctor, who was hung up in the OR. I thought, “My kid’s not in the OR. She’s right here with me.” As I left the hospital, I looked up and saw a Life Flight helicopter touching down. My heart ached for whoever was inside. The whole experience was one of those things that helps you stop taking good health for granted — at least for a while.

Eve: Yes, health — a major blessing. As I sing in choir, next to me sings a blind chorister, her eyes blankly searching the air above her, her hand patting about as she makes any movement. But she is joyful — quick to laugh and always wearing a broad smile. She makes me ashamed of my own demeanor and ashamed of how much I take for granted. The what-if’s start hammering me. “What if I couldn’t see my son’s beaming face as he played sports, or my hubby’s funky dance moves? The sweet peas, the California sunsets, my father’s twinkling eyes just prior to his jokes; if these were all unknown to me, would I be as joyful?” It gives me pause.

Bernice: I took a plane to Wisconsin last weekend — off to visit family — and ended up sitting next to a young woman dressed in desert fatigues. She told me she was training for deployment to Afghanistan. She held my baby and told me how much she loved kids. As I was getting ready to deplane, she asked, “When I’m over there, will you email me and tell me how your baby is doing?” It was a powerful moment. I’m opposed to our presence over there, but I understood her intentions: she was going away for me and my baby, sacrificing to protect our way of life. I was grateful for her sacrifice.

Eve: I’m also giving thanks this year for visits from my nephew Tom, a new Marine who’s stationed in town. I can tell his example of service to country inspires my children, and that makes me proud of them and him. Just getting the kids to think beyond themselves, to think of sacrifice for others, is a beautiful thing.

Bernice: To say nothing of getting me beyond myself… My youngest girl is a challenge — she seems to have held on to the defiant stage longer than anybody. But even that has aspects I’m grateful for: she calls me to my better self. She stretches my sensibilities, makes me actively cultivate gentleness and patience, just so I can get through the day without a battle.

Eve: And of course the holidays always make me grateful and wistful for the family I come from. Not that my family’s perfect. It’s just that this is the time of year when we overlook imperfections and make it all about love, food, and family. I wish I could be with them for Thanksgiving dinner.

Bernice: Food is how I like to show love. Knocking myself out with Thanksgiving feast preparations is how I say thanks to Mom and Dad and everybody for all their love over the years.

Eve: When I was a child, Thanksgiving was the family gathered around the round dining table, glass-bottomed pewter steins filled with apple cider, Dad’s creamed onions and Mom’s burnt-marshmallow-covered yams. Why were those marshmallows always burnt? These years, the holiday is a potluck gathering with my husband’s extended family and friends, multiple tables with autumn leaves as name cards, long serving tables piled high with food, and hours on end of talk, live music, and rowdy kids’ games.

Bernice: Ha! And don’t forget the rowdy adults. My clan is smaller than yours, but it seems like every Thanksgiving, I lose another piece of my grandmother’s china — the set she left me when she died. Uncle Harry always insists on clearing, and he always stacks the plates too high, and so it’s not really a surprise when I survey the damage, but still... And once you get a couple of Jack and Cokes into Harry’s wife Aunt Phyllis, her bunions are liable to become the topic of conversation over dessert. Oh, and my husband always ends up on plunger detail at some point during the visit. But I try to accept it and stay humble — I can remember Thanksgivings at Uncle Henry and Aunt Phyllis’s house, back when I was a teenager. I was too busy worrying about myself to notice if we broke their china or stopped up their toilet, but we always got invited back.

— Eve Kelly

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child.”

— King Lear

Perhaps Shakespeare should have rendered that bit about the serpent as “How common as a horse’s hoof” or some such. Children, in my experience, are not naturally grateful. They regard whatever blessings they receive as the normal course of events. You have to train them to say “Thank you,” and even then, there is a sad tendency to forget the blessing even as the words hang in the air, to move on to What’s Next. You have to threaten them with unspeakable horrors to get them to write thank-you notes. And no power on earth can make them grateful for food they don’t like, no matter how many starving Africans you may be tempted to invoke.

And, of course, thankless children grow up into thankless adults. It’s right there in the Bible, right after the part where Jesus heals ten lepers. “And one of them, realizing he had been healed, returned, glorifying God in a loud voice; and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked Him. He was a Samaritan. Jesus said in reply, ‘Ten were cleansed, were th, , , ey not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?’ ” Lepers. Their lives were ruined, until suddenly, they weren’t. But nine out of ten ex-lepers agreed: “What have you done for me lately?”

John Lanchester (or rather, one of his characters) put it neatly (and coldly) in his novel The Debt to Pleasure: “It has not, I think, been sufficiently stressed that gratitude does not exist; the term has come into being to describe an emotion of which ethics teaches us to demand the existence, for the purposes of moral algebra, of making the equations balance…in the space where ‘gratitude’ is routinely described as existing, there is instead a compound of duty, guilt, and most especially resentment; no action anywhere in the history of the world has ever been undertaken out of gratitude.”

I am not quite so chilled as Lanchester’s man, but I do think he is on to something. The Continental Congress proclaimed a Thanksgiving in 1777, saying, “FOR AS MUCH as it is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for Benefits received…” Duty and obligation — with gratitude! George Washington, when he proclaimed a Thanksgiving in 1789, began this way: “Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits…” Duty and obedience — with gratitude! And Lincoln put it this way in 1863: “It has seemed to me fit and proper that [these gracious gifts from God] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people.” The tone is gentler, but “fit and proper” is pretty much another way of saying “right and just,” no?

According to these Architects of Thanksgiving, gratitude is something we are obligated to have. But emotions are slippery things; they don’t always respond so well to obligation. (Often, they’re downright rebellious; this is why Frank Sinatra sounds very much as if he’s trying not to laugh when he sings that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. Go listen; you can hear the smirk.) I think that’s why the Architects put duty first. That way, before thanksgiving is a question of gratitude, it is a question of justice. (Is it at all interesting that Aristotle doesn’t cover gratitude in his book on Ethics?) God gave, and now you owe Him. You should feel good about it — it was nice of God, and He didn’t have to do it, and life really is pretty fabulous these days, thanks (at least in part) to Him — but even if you don’t, the point stands.

Looking this over, I see I have performed a bit of intellectual sleight-of-hand on my own self, substituting “gratitude” for “thanks” in my attempt to revise the Bard. It’s the child who won’t give thanks when thanks are due that’s painful and vicious; gratitude never enters into it. But! Have another look at those proclamations — it’s God this and Providence that, and what about the fact that this most religious of countries has nevertheless managed to secularize a holiday as supremely theistic as Christmas? Here’s a claim: we don’t much care for obligation on our days off. Sure, Christians go to church on Christmas and Easter, but that’s because the church that invented them called them Holy Days of Obligation and put the fear of hell into people who didn’t get their ass to Mass. What did the guys behind Thanksgiving have to compete with that? (Well, actually, the nation’s birth and its endurance through a bloody Civil War. But still, that was, like, years ago. What have you done for me lately?)

At Christmas, we get around the God problem (and its attendant obligations) by invoking The Christmas Spirit™ of giving, which may or may not have anything to do with the baby Jesus. But what to do with Thanksgiving? It’s right there in the name: Thanks. Thanks are given to Someone; duty is a duty to Someone. How to keep God (and the thanks He is owed) out of our turkey and football and four-day weekend? Answer: call in gratitude! Gratitude, being an emotion — and therefore a slippery, slightly amorphous thing — can exist just fine without a specific object. Life is good. We did not make it so. Who did make it so is not all that important; the feeling remains, warm and fuzzy, like the post-turkey naps. Or, to take another, smaller-scale but still appropriate example: we may feel grateful to The Wife for making a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner, but damned if we’re therefore obliged to do the dishes.

I’ll close by shifting holidays yet again, this time to New Year’s Day, 1994. I’m a junior in college, visiting a friend for the holidays. We’re both Catholics. We go to a party on New Year’s Eve. I wind up spilling the better part of my bottle of Maker’s Mark into the New Jersey snow, but I still get a fair amount inside me. And, of course, the evening lasts well past midnight. But before we go to bed, my friend turns to me with his impossible charm and arched eyebrows and says, “Mass at seven? It’ll be great.” I fight through my buzz and say yes, and you know what? It is great. Mind you, I don’t feel grateful while I’m there in the church. I feel tired and a little fuzzy. But what I’m doing seems to me fit and proper — giving thanks for the year gone by, imploring blessings for the year to come. It’s a sacrifice, offering the first fruits of the day before breakfast and a nap and about nine hours of bowl games. Grateful or no, it makes the New Year mean something.

— Matthew Lickona