Monday, December 01, 2003
Tranqsgiving - A Celebration of Falling Asleep at the Table
(written late friday night in a nearly-illegible scrawl)
Tonight was unusual. Tonight 30 or so members of my family got together for thanksgiving. Games were played and wine was quaffed and connections were forged and reinforced. It was the realization of the ideal of the holiday, multigenerational and multiethnic and uniformly euphoric. And in my family, that’s unprecedented.
I grew up with TG as a holiday as dry and tasteless as the turkey we were forced to be thankful for. My relatives (in this case, on my dad’s side) were moribund and hidebound, and I never felt as if the holiday was much more than an obligation. I seriously questioned why it would be continued, onerous as it was in practice as I experienced it.
Then I got a life of my own going, and my friends and I started doing TG each year as a triumphant festival of satiation, something aligned with, and only slightly removed from, a bacchanal. I grew to look more forward to TG every year as these friends grew more important to me, as my traditions with them deepened, as our lives fructified and our dreams coalesced. Every year on TG we and our friends ate better, revelled more gladly, and drank more deeply, in celebration of a terrestrial munificence that exceeded our capacity to honor it - so we each cooked out hearts out and brought all we could, fresh bread and soup and salad and fish and turkey and second turkey, stuffing and second stuffing, mashies and roasted potatoes and tsimmis and a dozen other dishes, starchy or green, 20 pies for 30 people plus brownies, cookies, cakes and galettes; Al asleep beneath the table with a drumstick in his hand.... These milestones established for me a proxy family, a band with whom I shared all but blood, and when we celebrated, heaven answered - that’s how much fun we had. We had so much fun that now my mom and sister and her husband all come out from far afield to share TG with us and our non-consanguinious peers. And several of our friends, too, have brought family on board - Catherine’s sister, Ralph’s mom, Andy’s sister, Jon’s brother; unrelated relatives, so hamish you could plotz… and the energizing spirit moved among us, creating of our varigated ancestries a verifiable family, made it so compelling and primary that actual family members now come along for the party.
But tonight [remember, that’s last friday night] was a night for my actual family to come together. My mom’s family has a big san fran contingent and her cousin hosted a “second thanksgiving.” Cousin Simon and his wife Kim just finished work on their gorgeous three-story totally rebuilt Georgian city house atop a prestigeous hill overlooking downtown and the bay bridge. There were easily 30 of us from my family, plus Kim has a lot of family in town, either visiting or living here, so we wound up with 20 or so of them as well. That’s a decent roster for a big festive meal.
The house is encrusted with world-class art (Simon’s the board Chair for the California College of the Arts) and we ate ourselves silly. I had three glasses of Ravenswood Lodi Zin and two tumblers of Wild Turkey; pork tenderloin, beef stroganoff, cranberry salad, sauteed veg and a staggering array of desserts, not least of which was a towering pile of my own chocolate-painted chocolate chip cookies, which I think I’ll call “heaven’s tears...”
We ate like we’d just invented it, with loud laughter and lots of gravy on the bread. There must have been 50 of us filing the showcase house, kids riding the elevator and playing hide-and-seek through the walk-through showers, and their parents just standing in the master retreat under the unrefinished redwood coping slats of the conical tower that thrusts upwards overhead, elevating even the most mundane thoughts and gilding them with the confection of the 270-degree christmas-lit downtown view…
then, meat-addled and wine-silly, 20 of us scampered up to the attic where we played Mafia, three generations of players, laughing with and lying to and killing off each other, till the “villagers” were triumphant and we all returned to the living room, 11 pm and time to put the party to bed - the first real family TG I’ve ever had, and, I hope, just the first in a long series.
So in summary, this year I had two thanksgivings in a row, both highly filling and successful - one, a traditional “friends” thanksgiving where family are infiltrating; and one, a new “family” thanksgiving where I found myself related to some really great friends. I’m thankful for: thanksgiving, and beloved souls with whom to spend it. Get that yule cranked up now, because we’re on a tight schedule till the superbowl…
