Please Let's Not Ruin Thanksgiving

Football, Food, Favors, and Fa La La

Next week we will all be busy cooking—perhaps even making the soup recipe below—and will have no time to read (or write) long articles. So I’m taking next week off and will be back in December. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

How could anyone not love Thanksgiving? We’re together with friends and family, cooking, eating, relaxing, cheering on the Vikings and the Timberwolves, taking walks, snacking on leftovers, and catching up. All this plus we get to wear our comfiest clothes and lounge around. Best of all, on Thanksgiving we take a moment to honor all that is good in our lives.

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash.

So I find it terribly sad that so many people these days seem to view Thanksgiving as a source of conflict with pugnacious uncles,¹ and as an excuse to purge “toxic” people from their lives. How did a holiday devoted to gratitude become an occasion for grievance? And it has only gotten worse since the election; think of those online takes advocating that we cut off family members who have voted differently from us, for our own safety.² This attitude is not only terribly sad, but also misguided. We cultivate happiness in our lives by feeling grateful and by connecting with other people. Thanksgiving is a gift.

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We need to restore Thanksgiving to the lovely holiday it used to be before politics wrecked everything. To help in this effort, I present the Four Fs: football, food, favors, and fa la la.

Football

It’s time to check my privilege. I did not grow up with contentious holiday gatherings, because everyone in my family is a Minnesota Democrat-Farm-Labor liberal. We were fans of Hubert H. Humphrey and, later, Paul Wellstone. My childhood Thanksgivings featured plenty of nodding along and chiming in, but no raised voices or anger. I do get that gatherings of politically-divided families are more challenging. But I still say that we can’t let politics ruin Thanksgiving. What to do?

Easy: Talk about football.

Football is just shorthand for any topic whatsoever that isn’t politics. Let us please knock it off with the “liberal tears” contempt on the one hand and the “You want me not to exist!” accusations on the other. There are far worthier topics for conversation. We can ask the older generation to share stories from their childhoods, or invite the younger generation to talk about their special interests—Shakespeare’s comedies, say, or dinosaurs.

Our son’s friend Katie made this Sims avatar of him after he delivered the following diatribe: “It drives me crazy that everyone thinks Spinosaurus is so badass just because it’s fifty feet long. Its arms are puny and face backward, and its jaw, while long, evolved mainly for catching fish. The idea that Spinosaurus would be a credible apex predator anywhere outside a riverine ecosystem is absurd.”

And if we find ourselves drifting inexorably into political disputes, we can drop everything and head outside to toss a ball around instead. Even the take-have-iest of online take-havers will acknowledge that a brisk game of touch football is more wholesome and fun than arguing.

Food

There is no force on earth that has the power to unite us like food. I know whereof I speak. When we lived in Prague, our kids went to an international school whose students came from sixty-nine different countries, including those with historic and/or ongoing conflicts, such as Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Iran, Turkey and Armenia, India and Pakistan, and Serbia and Croatia. Our community included devout Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and atheists too. We all managed to get along just fine, and many of us even became close friends with people on the other side of these spurious divisions.

Tania (Russia), Lilia (Tatarstan), Svetlana (Russia), and Larisa (Ukraine) are besties. In Lilia’s words, “We are women. We are mothers. We know that only love will save our world.”

The most joyous day of the year was International Day, when the entire community would come together to celebrate our countries’ beloved dishes.

My friends and I serving good old American chili for International Day. (I am the tall one on the left.)

Food brings us together at our Thanksgiving tables too. Below is a soup that I love to make this time of year. Whether you are hosting or going to the home of friends or family, pumpkin soup makes an excellent—and easy—contribution to the holiday table.

Pumpkin Soup

This soup is vegetarian and gluten-free. To make it vegan, just omit the cream and substitute olive oil for the butter. You can make it ahead of time and then reheat it right before serving. Serves 8.

Ingredients

1 butternut squash, or canned pumpkin purée,³ to make 3c total purée

olive oil (omit if using canned pumpkin)

4T unsalted butter

1 small onion, finely minced

1 small clove garlic, finely minced with 1tsp salt to make a paste

leaves from several sprigs of thyme

1/4tsp nutmeg

1/8tsp cayenne pepper

2–3c vegetable stock, either store-bought or homemade

salt and freshly-ground black pepper to taste

about 1/4c heavy cream (or more, to taste)

about 1/2c pumpkin seeds, toasted

leaves from 1 or 2 sprigs of sage, chopped

Method

For the pumpkin purée:

1. Preheat the oven to 375F/190C.

2. Cut the stem end off the squash and then cut the squash in half lengthwise. Scoop out and discard the seeds and stringy bits.

3. Drizzle each half with olive oil and then place the halves face-down in a baking dish.

4. Add about 1c water and roast for 45 minutes to an hour until the squash is soft.

5. Cool, peel, and mush up the squash. If you have more than 3c of purée, you can save the rest and make my recipe for squash biscuits another time.

Note: It’s fine to make the pumpkin purée a day or two ahead. Or, you know, just use canned pumpkin. Purée made from fresh squash is tastier and makes your soup a lovely bright orange, but people are busy! Who has time to make everything from scratch?

For the soup:

1. In a medium soup pot, melt the butter and then sauté the onions, sprinkling salt over them to help them along. Add in the chopped garlic and the herbs and spices and briefly sauté.

2. Add in the pumpkin purée, mix, and heat through. Pour in some of the stock and stir. The amount of stock you need will depend on how liquid your purée is. You want a slightly thick, bisque-like texture.

3. With an immersion blender, purée the soup until it is smooth. If necessary, add additional stock and salt and pepper to taste. Note: You can make the soup ahead up to this point and store it in the fridge.

4. Just before serving, reheat the soup, add the cream, and stir until heated through. Top each bowl with the chopped sage and pumpkin seeds and serve.

Favors

Do you have a relative you can’t abide? Or a cranky neighbor who voted for someone you think is heinous? Don’t turn your back on them. Try the third F instead: Do them a favor. Bring your grouchy grandpa a beer and toast the Vikings together. Ask your conservative cousin about his church choir, or your liberal aunt about her volunteer project—and then really listen. If your neighbor has a yard sign to which you object, never mind. Bring him groceries when he’s sick. Or if your neighbor objects to your yard sign, go over and fix her computer for her anyway.

Here’s a personal example: I have an online friend whose politics are waaaaaay over on the right. She recently finished a memoir, and she asked me to be an early reviewer to help boost the book’s signal on Amazon. She knows that I am waaaaaay over on the left, so I take it as a compliment that she asked me for this favor. She is trusting me to be objective and to give her book a fair review. (I am happy to report that the book is very good.) When we turn away from politics and toward one another, we find that these favors are not difficult. Plus, the friends we make and perspectives we discover are a fine reward for our willingness to step outside our bubble.

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Really this entire post is about a fifth F: Forgiveness. Not a single one of us is perfect, and this includes people in our family and community. Guess what? Us too. We all need to forgive and to be forgiven. We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Now is not the time to cast people out or to exile ourselves. Instead of constricting our social circle we must begin to expand it. Thanksgiving is the perfect day to start.

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How about you, readers? What are you thankful for this year? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Attentive readers may have noticed that I haven’t yet mentioned the fourth F, fa la la. It’s time! When I was a kid, we often sang together during the holidays. My mom played the piano, and everyone gathered around. If old-timey songs aren’t your jam, there’s always karaoke. It is a scientific fact that every American knows “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Sweet Caroline,” “I Will Always Love You,” “Dancing Queen,” and “Purple Rain.”⁴ You can search for karaoke versions of favorite songs on YouTube, and everyone can sing along. Singing is fun, and it connects us: When we sing, we listen to each other. We take deep breaths. We make a joyful noise.

Why not now? “We Gather Together” is a beautiful Thanksgiving hymn. If you know it, sing along! Fa la la!

1. Why is it always uncles who are accused of wrecking holiday dinners? Seems unfair. The vast majority of uncles are (literally) avuncular. My uncle is terrific, and I bet yours is too.

2. One disclaimer: I am not talking about people who have cut off families that have been (and often continue to be) abusive. People who have grown up in truly abusive families really do sometimes need to take such a radical step for their own protection. This essay aims to heal ruptures over political disagreements, not over actual abuse.

3. This is not an error. Did you know that most canned pumpkin purée is butternut squash, not actual pumpkin? Mind blown!

4. Ok, fine. I admit that these songs are also old-timey.