Everyone loves the iconic Norman Rockwell picture of a family at Thanksgiving dinner. At the head of the table stand grandpa and grandma, smiling. She is in the act of setting down a platter, with a turkey the size of a small dinosaur. Along both sides of the table sit the various members of the family – sons and daughters, grandchildren, aunts and uncles and cousins, all smiling and talking, with not a cell phone in sight.
The Norman Rockwell image was created as a seasonal magazine cover in 1943. Not many families are like that now, and perhaps no families ever were, except in some mythical house on the prairie. But still the family is our tribe and shelter of last resort, when all other loyalties fail. When your team loses, your candidate is voted out, and your cat fails to get a prize in the cat show, there’s always the family. Disgraced, incompetent, or criminal politicians and CEOs invariably cover their departure by saying, without much enthusiasm, that they plan to spend more time with their families. You would have to have a heart of stone not to feel sorry for those families. Young people who can’t keep a job or pay the rent come back to their families. Soldiers return from war to their families. Families are powerful magic.
But family get-togethers are more complicated than they used to be. The fashion for multiple divorces and remarriages makes a family reunion more like a memory test, or even a DNA test, and often means that we have a choice of grandmothers and mothers to visit at this time of year.
Thanksgiving travel is hard too. It’s no longer a simple case of “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House We Go.” It’s more likely to be “Over the George Washington Bridge and down I-95 to Grandmother’s House We Go.”
But the really challenging thing about Thanksgiving is the food. Not only does the traditional menu contradict every known principle of diet and health, but also there is the inescapable fact that somebody has to cook it. The Baby Boom moms and their daughters are doing most of the Thanksgiving work these days, and their lives are too busy for cooking. The newspapers may be full of menus for delightful little Thanksgiving extras like roasted cauliflower, raisins and anchovy vinaigrette or spiced sweet potato pudding. But who has time for this?
So more and more restaurants and hotels are offering a Thanksgiving package. Our local deli will deliver the whole gastronomic catastrophe to your home for a very modest price – health insurance not included.
This is what the biologists call evolutionary adaptation. Thanksgiving dinner is a big commitment for a busy woman, but it’s easy for professional chefs with the resources of a professional kitchen. So we can hope that progress and the catering industry will eventually liberate moms and daughters from all that, so they too can enjoy the sociable pleasures of the holiday without worrying about the food. Alternatively the men of the household could pitch in and help, or even take over. But this is the season of Thanksgiving. We have to wait a little longer for the age of miracles.
Copyright: David Bouchier
