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Sounds of Thanksgiving
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For most people, holiday angst hits a peak in December. Not for me.
Having grown up in the shadow of Essex County’s biologically dense, 2,048-acre South Mountain Reservation, my relationship with the genus Meleagris (turkeys), and Thanksgiving, has always been ambivalent at best. My days in elementary school art class assembling topographic portraits of smiling birds featuring colored cotton-ball plumes and construction-paper wattles were countered with dinnertime horror stories about how a turkey viciously pecked hundreds of dollars of damage into the side panel of a family friend’s hunter green Camry. Of course, the Camry was repaired, and we annually consumed the birds with a gusto that nearly justified their vandalism, but the palliative effect of gnawing on their tryptophan-rich meat never really lasted. My problems with Thanksgiving run deeper.
It’s certainly not the principles on which the holiday was founded that bother me, it’s that the defining elements of its current incarnation appear to be so…well…thankless. I suppose it’s my realization that an actual celebration of religious freedom in progressive America has become akin to sitting around a table loaded with store-bought salmon, fêting of our right to angle, as well as the depressing fact that most Americans identify Native Americans solely as casino proprietors rather than as those who once welcomed the Pilgrims.
Celebrating the holiday with my mom’s clan—a thin-skinned, irritable cadre of hypoglycemics and diabetics straight out of a Woody Allen movie— has featured an abundance of austere starches and none of the usual cranberry sauce and other tasty sugars. Coupled with a healthy portion of guilt and prodding to procreate, it’s hardly a Norman Rockwell painting.
Of late, we’ve taken to going to my father’s sister’s house, where a new Thanksgiving tradition has been adopted: a post-meal guitar-accompanied 1960s-style hootenanny featuring collective performances of the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young songbook. One year, after a string of particularly grueling and tonally questionable renditions that included Richie Havens’s “Freedom,” Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and America’s “Horse with No Name,” I was asked to pick up my guitar and play. Needless to say, family and guests seemed a tad nonplussed when I decided to break out Jimmy Cox’s 1923 paean to Jazz Age weltschmerz, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.”
To be sure, there are things for which I am genuinely thankful, but it seems a bit grotesque to voice them only one day a year. So this November, I’ll express my thanks that New Jersey’s hunting season allows for the bagging of turkeys, that I can take sublime pictures of the turning leaves, and that the Millburn Delicatessen’s excellent “Gobbler” sandwich can be ordered year-round. Arrive there early on a Saturday morning, and you’ll find that you can feast on one at the tables outside, in blissful solitary silence.
Adam Wasserman hopes one day to spend Thanksgiving stranded in an airport.
