Hold the turkey, just say 'Thanks'

Rob Price

"The important thing is keeping everything relaxed," my mother says on the phone.

She is giving my wife and me tips on how to get through the Thanksgiving holiday without blowing a gasket. Skip the creamed onions, she advises. No one really likes them. And keep the turkey stuffing simple. Nobody cares what's in the stuffing; they just dump a lot of turkey gravy over it, anyway.

"Actually," my wife says, "we were thinking of skipping the turkey this year. Rob wants to cook a suckling pig on his new grill."

My mother falls silent. She is completely in favor of relaxed Thanksgivings; on the other hand, sacrificing the turkey is going a little too far.

"Just kidding," my wife says. And we grin at each other. We go through this routine every year - holding unsolicited advice at armís length - as 500 of our closest relatives prepare to travel to our home for the Thanksgiving holiday and weekend. It's the formal kick-off of the holiday season, a four-week ordeal that is anything but calming or soothing. My mother is right: The important thing is staying relaxed. The trouble is, no one knows how to do it.

The truth is, my wife and I really don't like roast turkey. The turkey is a bird that requires a disproportionate amount of time for cooking the thighs and legs. By the time those limbs are properly done, the breast meat is always overcooked. You can douse the white meat with lots of gravy, but you still have to contend with meat that basically has turned stringy.

All the same, every year we buy another 25-pound turkey and lob it into the oven. Traditions are important. We spent our childhoods eating turkey once a year. It tasted good - at least we thought so - and we want to maintain that connection with the days when we also liked chocolate milk.

My family has always eaten Thanksgiving dinner at night, partly because the bird we cook is so large it requires seven or eight hours of roasting. But also because the evening hours are generally the time when we let our hair down a bit and get - at my mother's urging - relaxed. This is the time when conversations can wander off into uncharted territory, and it's pleasant to sit around the dinner table after the main assault of the meal, lingering over a glass of wine and meandering chit chat.

In recent years, my sister-in-law - a woman who favors organization - has introduced a guiding topic for this undirected period of the evening: What do each of us feel thankful for on this particular Thanksgiving Day? Prepare a 150-word essay on the subject. Recite.

One year, I answered: "The presidency of George W. Bush," which made my mother-in-law so angry, I was nearly forced to retract the statement at the point of a carving knife. Nowadays, I keep my thanksgivings simple: Good health; nimble fingers that can fly over a keyboard, and the strange fact that of all the possible places my extended family could choose to gather, the big, wide roads of our lives seem to converge, year after year, on the Southern Tier of New York.

This year, the relatives will include my mother-in-law and her current husband, who plan to fly up from their new home in Mexico. There will be one of my mother-in-law's former husbands and his current wife; my own mother and father, and a brotherin law whom I haven't seen in a couple years, due to arrive with two children but, alas, no wife.

They'll start trickling in Wednesday, and will come bearing the cares and wears of the past year, and hopefully platters of food to contribute to the overall feast. On Thursday, my wife and I, grumbling, will push the annual fowl into the oven and begin basting it with a tangerine/butter sauce my wife has been making for the past 20 years.

"I hope youíre not going to bother with creamed onions," my mother will say, but then Susan will pull a casserole of creamed onions from the refrigerator, where she will have been storing them. Creamed onions are important - so is turkey. The issue isn't whether the meat is stringy. It's a familiar connection to the past - and to each other - around which we gather, asking each other what we feel thankful for.