If you were to ask me what my Thanksgiving tradition is, I wouldn’t have a straight answer. Over the years, I’ve gone from being the cute two-year-old who “finger paints ” the seasoning on the turkey, to this year, where I’m having a quiet Thanksgiving with just my sister and dad.
Back in the day, my mom’s family – generally composed of my grandmother and two aunts, and sometimes my dad’s parents, or my grandparents, would come down to the D.C.-area to enjoy Thanksgiving with us. I will never forget my mom calling my sister and me into the kitchen when the turkey was ready to be seasoned, and we would dash in like huge presents awaited us. But, no. Just a blue bowl of goopy seasoning and a raw turkey breast got us going. We’d get seasoning all over our hands and smear it all over the turkey; all I remember is thinking it was so much fun. My sister and I would even fight over whether or not we each got a perfectly equal half of the turkey to season, and my mom would become the referee and finish the job. Besides, I don’t think my mom would serve food that was only prepared by toddlers . . . at least I hope!
During the days of the turkey-seasoning tantrums, my grandparents on my dad’s side of my family only lived about 30 minutes away; however, my mom’s side of the family was coming in from New York and for a couple of years, one of my aunts flew in all the way from California. When I was four or five, my grandparents moved to the Boston area and when I was 11 or so, all of my mom’s family moved to Florida. There went our family Thanksgivings.
For our first family-less Thanksgiving, we invited family friends to come over. It was perfect – one of the daughters is my sister’s age and the other daughter is my age. So while our parents worked in the kitchen to prepare dinner, we just got to act like it was a “play-date.” My sister and I wound up going back with our family friends to their house to turn our Thanksgiving feast into a sleepover. I guess you’d call it “Thanksgiving: Tween Style.”
After that, we were loners. All of my family’s friends already had plans to go to big feasts, and my family couldn’t make the trip up to Maryland. So we did “Thanksgiving: Singley Style.” And, 50 percent of the Singley family doesn’t like turkey, so what did we have? Chicken. Momma Singley doesn’t love to cook, so what did we do? Get Chicken Out. That’s right. And it was one great Thanksgiving – just the four of us with a couple of chickens and some sides that we re-heated in the oven before eating. Now that’s what I call a feast.
So that became our Thanksgiving tradition. We’d get chickens and sides from Chicken Out the day before, eat in our more formal dining room as opposed to the plain old table in our kitchen and cap it at just the four of us. Yet, things changed again in 2006 when my mom became a volunteer EMT at Bethesda Chevy-Chase Rescue Squad. The volunteers have to sign up for a “night crew” which works one night-shift a week, and my mom was on Thursday night. And what day is Thanksgiving always on? Thursday. So our feast of four reduced to three while my mom was off playing superhero on Thanksgiving. But of course, we continued our Chicken Out tradition.
From all of my Thanksgiving feasts – turkey to chicken, family to no family, cooking to ordering food – they’ve all been great. It doesn’t matter if your feast is a Norman Rockwell painting or the craziest feast you could think of, as long as you’re enjoying your time with the people you’re with, that’s all that matters.
