Thanksgiving Day starts quietly in my house, with just my immediate family. In the morning, we gather in the kitchen to begin cooking and watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We alternate between laughing at the outrageous balloons and watching in awe at the various performances. The Rockettes are our favorite. When they come onscreen, everyone stops what they are doing and rushes to the couch to watch. No matter how many times I see them perform, the perfectly synchronized kickline makes my jaw drop every time.
In the early afternoon, guests begin arriving. Everyone is greeted with a warm hug, side dish or dessert in hand, which pile up on the countertops until it’s time to eat. Food is the most important part of any holiday for my family — cooking is our love language. I joke that my parents were perfectly accepting when I came out as bisexual, but they genuinely might disown me if I told them I was a vegetarian. All this to say, Thanksgiving is all about the food. We begin with the appetizer course, which gives us the room to be a little inventive and let our heritage shine through.
My family has roots in Italy and in the Middle East. As such, one of our staple appetizers is Italian stuffed clams. This is a very involved recipe. When I was young, my Nana would make it every year. After she passed, my dad took on the job, and we realized how difficult it really is. My sister and I stand over the sink with sponges, scrubbing the sand and grime off the clam shells until our arms are numb. Meanwhile, my dad cleans the meat, which involves cutting the edible part free from the guts and waste products (it’s gross). Once everything is clean, my dad cuts, seasons, and cooks the crab meat. Next, he stuffs the clam shells with the meat and tops with flavored breadcrumbs, then bakes the whole thing in the oven. Stuffed clams are delicious, and serving them in the original shells makes them super fun to eat. Since that first year, my dad just reuses the same clamshells and buys canned, pre-chopped clam meat to stuff them with.
As for our Middle Eastern side, another highly involved appetizer is yebadet, the Armenian-Syrian version of dolma. It’s a rolled grape leaf stuffed with lamb and rice and topped with a lemony, garlicky sauce. Just like the stuffed clams, it is a lot of work. It takes a couple of hours to roll the yebadet up. My mom has a very special technique that she learned from her sitto (grandmother in Arabic). You take a palm-sized portion of the meat mixture, then roll it between your hands to form a log. Next, you take a grape leaf and place it down, veiny-side up. You place the meat log at the base, then begin rolling as tightly as possible, tucking the sides in as you go. This is a technique that my siblings and I have all mastered. However, as kids, we were rather awful. We would beg my mom to let us help her roll the yebadet. She would agree, but would only let us roll about three before sending us off. Once we were out of sight, she would unroll and redo each of our yebadets, or else they risked falling apart as they cooked.
After some time to catch up and digest our appetizers, the family moves into the dining hall to begin eating. Because my mom is the most type-A person ever, every detail of Thanksgiving has to be planned, including where everyone is sitting. As an equally type-A eldest daughter, it is my job to make the seating charts. And when you’re hosting a group as big as 23 people, this is no easy task. You see, my family does not believe in a kids table. Everyone sits together in one room, at one table. We do whatever we have to to make everyone fit, including dragging in mismatched chairs from the basement and even adding an ugly folding table to the side of our dining table to make it bigger. Our approach to Thanksgiving seating is to intermingle people at the table. Grandmas sit next to uncles, and aunts sit next to little children, who sit next to other grandmas. Siblings and married couples are separated, and people from opposite sides of the family find themselves next to each other. This ensures that everyone at the table gets to know each other and feels like one family. No cliques at this party.
We begin our Thanksgiving dinner with the soup course, which brings some experimental elements to the holiday. For a few years, my mom was on a mission to try out a variety of unusual and intriguing soups for the pre-dinner course. Eventually, she settled upon a parsnip, white chocolate, and pomegranate seed soup that has now become a family staple every Thanksgiving. The first year she made it, we were all skeptical. You wouldn’t think these three flavors work together, but they actually do. We tasted it with caution, and were surprised to find it delicious and sophisticated. The parsnip provides a rich and earthy flavor that forms the base of the soup, while the chocolate adds sweetness, and the pomegranate seed topping adds a pop of acidity. This fan-favorite dish is now known among the family as “chocolate soup,” as in, “OMG Mom, are you gonna make the chocolate soup this year?!?!”
From there, we break out the side dishes and turkey that has been roasting for the past few hours. While it may be more traditional to put all the dishes out on the dining table and pass them around, my family prefers a buffet-style serving method based in the kitchen. Each person grabs a plate and takes what they want before heading to the dining room to eat. If they want seconds, they simply get up and head back to the kitchen to take more food. This avoids overcrowding on the dining table.
Last year, we tried a new Thanksgiving activity that I hope becomes a tradition. While we were sitting around the table, we each took turns telling the person to our right why we were grateful for them. I received heart-warming compliments from my older cousin who has always been a role model for me. I then turned to my roommate, who came home with me for Thanksgiving. I told her how I was grateful to her for being a super funny friend and always putting up with me accidentally locking myself out of our dorm room. My roommate then turned to my great-aunt Laura, whom she had met only a few hours before. “I know I don’t know you that well, but you seem very kind and I’m grateful that you welcomed me to your family Thanksgiving so warmly,” she said. The thank you train was super cute and super sweet, but I will warn you that it did result in the entire table crying happy tears by the end.
After dishwashing and digesting, it’s time for dessert. Each year, my uncle and cousin, the master pie makers in the family, bring a new and impressively creative dessert. For example, one year my cousin brought a lemon and lavender cake decorated with gorgeous edible flowers. The presentation was stunning, as was the flavor.
My grandmother has always brought strange desserts to our Thanksgiving, usually involving some kind of Jello. For a long time, she brought Konx Blox, which are basically cubes of strawberry Jello made more solid by adding extra gelatin, and a Jello cake in a bundt mold. These desserts are not particularly good; however, they are a fun way to add some whimsy to the dessert course.
For many, the post-Thanksgiving dinner tradition is to watch the evening football game. Although the men in my family participate in this tradition, the female family members prefer to get a head start on the next holiday. We gather by the TV in the den to watch a Christmas movie. We cuddle up on the couch, wrapped in blankets and snacking on some leftover appetizers, even though we’re all already stuffed to the brim. Most of the time, we watch Elf, otherwise known as the greatest Christmas movie of all time. Genuinely, I have seen this movie at least once per year for the last 15 years of my life. I’ve basically memorized the whole script, and my family quotes it all the time (“You’re a cottonheaded ninnymuggins!”) We watch this movie to get in the mood for the upcoming holiday, so that we are all ready for the Christmas season by the time Thanksgiving ends.