TradishUUUN, tradition! or lack thereof!

God Forbid We Celebrate Thanksgiving Like Normal People

As the child of bohemian, peripatetic  parents, I yearned for traditions, for anchors, for terra firma, for a chance to say, “We always…” about something. “We always make pancakes on Sunday morning,” “We always go see the Christmas windows at Lord & Taylor.” Nobody else seemed to notice we were missing something, so I set out to create some traditions for us, for my family.

I tried to establish an annual tradition where my dad – a man raised in a Kosher home in Borough Park, Brooklyn – would read “A Visit from St. Nick” in his booming voice every Christmas eve. He obliged one year, not unhappily, but it didn’t take; nobody but me cared.

One year – age 8 or 9 -- I gave myself a job usually assigned to a bachelor uncle or the guy who owns the hardware store. For the benefit of my little brother, I dressed myself up as Santa Claus, wearing my snazzy red vinyl coat (Santa as styled by Fiorucci?), and relieving the medicine cabinet of its entire stock of cotton balls. No surprise, this little attempt was a  one-off.

We certainly had no real Thanksgiving traditions, not even at the most basic level, i.e., we couldn't even claim that every year we sat down with family and ate turkey somewhere, anywhere. A couple of times we went to my grandmother’s or my aunt’s in Brooklyn (our big tradition in this scenario was always to be late; sometimes there would be shouting about it). One year my mother tried to make a goose. There was the time we went out to dinner, deeply offending my fantasies of what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like – and I don’t think anyone even ordered turkey. Yet another time my mother woke herself up at 4:00 a.m. to start cooking the damn Bird.

I’ve never liked Thanksgiving. I don’t like turkey white meat; it tastes like nothing, and has a texture reminiscent of a woodchip. And I guess I didn’t like Thanksgiving because of what it represented – a lack of family traditions, our family’s inability to make statements that began, “Every July 4th we…” or “Every time it snows, we…”

As an adult, as a parent, I haven’t really turned things around in this department the way I thought I might, once I was the grown-up. It so happens I’ve had some very lovely Thanksgivings over the past couple of decades, but there’s no “Every year for Thanksgiving, we…”. Jeff and I spent one exceptional and unusual Thanksgiving, pre-kids, in Venice. The mist rose obligingly off the Grand Canal, and there was nary a roasted flightless bird to be found. Another time, we had a lovely Thanksgiving at the country house of friends (a converted farmhouse in a field – a Gourmet magazine photo spread-ready setting), with our kids, and their kids, and another pair of friends and their kids. And here and there, back in Brooklyn, I even managed to turn out a couple of passable birds myself with the help of scandalous amounts of butter.

And one time, 10 years ago, when I was 8 1/2 months  pregnant with my first kid – too pregnant to go anywhere, too pregnant to feed anybody – Jeff and my in-laws and my mother and my sister-in-law and I had a Thanksgiving dinner at a lovely restaurant a couple of blocks from home. Cucina, helmed by Michael Ayoub, was the first “good” restaurant (read: Manhattan-y) in Park Slope, the first one that might induce Manhattanites to cross a river. It no longer exists. There was another restaurant at that address for several years, and it, too, is now gone. This year, Michael Ayoub returned to the site and opened up a new restaurant. And guess what, that’s where my little family is having Thanksgiving this year.

Phew!  I officially have the right to say, “Every ten years we have Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant at 254 5th Avenue that is owned by Michael Ayoub.” A tradition! Michael Ayoub, you'd better cooperate.

Enjoy your version, be it unique to this year, or an always and every. And pass the yams.