thanksgiving sux
Looks like someone got carried away with the italics again. It was me. I got carried away.
Readers, it is with no small amount of satisfaction that I am here to report that I hate Thanksgiving. What started out with a distaste for the myriad “foods” associated with the holiday has morphed into an all out war. From platters of shitty turkey, to the ubiquitous green bean casseroles, to the horrifying attempts at pie crust, I am convinced that this holiday is one of those strange social constructs that persists simply because it’s bad and people generally like things that are bad for them in some way.
But one thing stands in the way of this supposition: people fucking love Thanksgiving.
And I cannot for the life of me fathom why.
Let me be frank from the start: I don’t really understand secular holidays. Anyone who’s known me for a while knows that I don’t much like the government and that has manifested in strange ways. Of course I’ll get my vaccines and wear a mask because I care about other people and it’s for the safety of the general populace that these are mandated for a country’s citizens. I, albeit with some hesitation, obey the majority of traffic laws. Forced frivolity at the hands of an institution? No. It could be a school pep rally, it could be a work party, I mean shit, I don’t even get excited for my own birthday anymore. I don’t like being forced to feel things that I don’t feel want to feel at any given point in time. Nothing says holiday joy like government mandated fun!
That the government is behind this supposed cultural holiday merely feeds the fire of distaste in my heart. Especially when that same government insists on putting little civic holidays in the calendar to commemorate questionable events (lookin’ at you, Columbus Day). Count me out. Veterans Day and Memorial Day, for example, both seem on the surface to be benign. They are intended to honor our soldiers, both fallen and traumatized, but they also give select businesses and government entities an extra couple of days to take off in their calendar. Seems fine, right? Sure. Except maybe we wouldn’t need these holidays if we, idk, stopped killing people in foreign countries and producing deceased soldiers but okay maybe that’s a little spicy and pacifist Maddie needs to go back into her corner for a week or two. But fine, keep adding nationalist holidays that celebrate the deaths of people who frankly, probably didn’t need to die in the first place. Instead, these holidays encourage the glorification of their unnecessary sacrifices. Seems kind of fucked (NB: I know it’s probably more complicated than that, let me have my fun at the expense of this shithole government).
Thanksgiving itself has contributed to a perverse notion that everything was hunky dory when the first handful of Puritans arrived on this side of the pond. Sure they were hungry and oh nbd, half of them died along the way to that first Thanksgiving. But golly isn’t it nice that they sat down with Native Americans for a nice dinner? No. The arrival of these western folks lead to an eventual genocide that lasted centuries. We still live with the lingering effects of this specific instance of colonialism, among others. They don’t tell you that in elementary school because American Exceptionalism™️ is alive and well. It pervades the thought around civic holidays, but especially Thanksgiving. Why would you pollute this nice little story with thoughts about colonialism? It is deeply troubling that we all manage to forget these dark truths from our history, however convenient it may be. Americans have a stunningly short cultural memory.
Damn Maddie, you’re getting kind of emo, eat this lovely plate of Thanksgiving food and maybe you’ll be less a n g e r y.
Um, excuse me? What part of any of that food is actually edible?
Of all the game birds—which I have had a surprising number of—turkey is the most reviled. When done right, wild game birds can be a profound luxury. Not so with turkey, whether wild, heritage, or factory farmed. It is without a doubt the most dry, the most flavorless, and it’s downright problematic with regards to farming practices. No one seems to know how to prepare them, and everyone rolls their eyes if they’re the ones asked to make the turkey that year. In fact, many people don’t even have ovens that will accommodate such mammoth birds, as I found out during the few years I attended Thanksgiving with my in-laws. No one legitimately seems to like these birds as a foodstuff, otherwise roasting a whole turkey would be a mainstay for American cooks, in the same way that other miscellaneous large pieces of meat are. Ah but wait, these large pieces of meat are often not mainstays for many people, because of their expense and the requisite bits of knowledge required to handle them properly. In addition to that, they’re fiddly and well, they’re meat. It is important to recall that vegetarianism and veganism are growing within the general populace. This is not a bad thing! But we have to remember that eating is simply not an option for a lot of people, be it by choice or not.
“Okay yeah but like if I have veg head show up they can just eat sides!”
So, a fun fact that shouldn’t be surprising at all: I was an extremely picky eater growing up. I still have that reputation, and I still avoid eating at large family gatherings because of it. I’ll eat all manner of vegetables but I remain averse to eating mammals (except, regretfully, bacon). I also don’t like eating food made by people I don’t know particularly well. This is all to say you can’t put a conventionally made green bean casserole in front of me and tell me it’s a vegetable. That congealed mess of canned soup and frozen or canned beans covered in a processed onion topping? As if. Worse still were the various treatments of sweet potato, all sickening and sweet in their marshmallowéd glory. Sweetened sweet potatoes are clearly a dessert. This vegetable deserves better treatment! Also strangely sweet was the strange franken-dish named corny bread which, best as I can still tell, was merely cornbread with either canned or frozen corn mixed into if for texture. It is devoid of nuance and is instead filled with sadness. All of these are somehow considered vegetables and all of them absolutely don’t count. They’re vegetables in the same way that pizza was considered a vegetable in 2011: truthfully not at all, but it’s okay because the government said it’s okay.
Other strange dishes to pop up at Thanksgivings past include miscellaneous jello “salads” that may or may not involve like a LOT of cool whip. Things like ambrosia “salad” or that weird pink fluff shit my aunt-in-law apparently receives requests for each year. In the research phase for this newsletter, my parents waxed poetic about my dad’s watergate “salad;” among the ingredients are cool whip, pistachio pudding mix, crushed pineapple, and like, halved grapes. It’s made me question what people think salads are. Apparently existential crises are on the menu this year.
Perhaps the most egregious offense—the one that most deeply affected this young lover of carbohydrates—was the stunning lack of potato dishes. There was always a single teeny baking dish of mashed potato that had been put in the oven (y tho) and developed a dummy thicc texture. And to make matters worse, it was always the first thing gone because there was never fucking enough. Skimping on the potatoes? In this economy? This is all to say that telling a vegetarian to “fill up on sides” is misleading at best and just plain rude at worst. I would hardly categorize any of the aforementioned foods as vegetables, let alone actual foods to begin with.
(Of course, we have said nothing of stuffing, that savory bread pudding masquerading as a seasonal side. It inevitably contained meat, thus disqualifying it from our considerations. It’s a damn shame; the idea is so good! But then they sneak random meats in there, and no one ever seems to know what they are. Send help.)
I suppose there’s always the desserts, which is to say: pie. On these I remain mostly neutral. Pumpkin pie kind of freaks me out, because you took this enormous vegetable lookin’ fruit and condensed it down into something that looks like comes out of a can. Ah right, that’s because it does. And fine, what’s another mass produced food amongst the hellscape of items we already have on the menu? Canned pumpkin is more reliable than baking down a squash on your own. While the custard that you turn it into turns me off, it’s a sensible use of pre-rendered ingredients. Perhaps the worst thing you will run into on the dessert table is a crappy pie crust, which, all things considered, means that at least whatever you put in your mouth here will still be pretty decent. You’d think that pie crust would be fairly straight forward, but I suspect its reputation for smelling fear scares people off. Thus, they lean on store-bought. Honestly, store-bought is still pretty good, hence why I think pie is generally the least offensive thing on the table. My personal preference is for the Nestle Tollhouse pies my mom makes each year, the sweet chocolate filling offset by a delightful, salty crust that she makes in a food processor. Thanksgiving desserts can be shitty, but even at their worst they’re probably still okay. But a dessert does not a meal maketh, unless you’re ten (or eighteen) and just looking to make the hunger pangs stop.
With all of this in mind, it’s shocking to see how people view eating on this holiday. Everyone makes a joke about eating their weight in food and wearing their stretchy pants, and how they’ll have to work it all off the next day while scrambling for discounted TVs. The indulgence is an expected fixture of Thanksgiving, just as turkey and pumpkin pie are. I think this is incredibly damaging. Human beings have had days of feasting and fasting for millennia; it’s a part of the cultural memory for many of us. But anymore, we often have too much. In our days of excess, I think it’s important to remember that food is intended to nourish, and that it’s okay to have indulgences. It’s okay for a holiday to be special and have special foods. At the same time, why on earth would you eat until you feel sick? It’s the antithesis of indulging in something. An indulgent food should feel special! Not sinful or even painful! Why the fuck would you want to feel bad about eating?! Plenty of people have disordered relationships with food, if not outright clinical eating disorders, that involve shame and guilt around foods, or binge eating until they feel sick. We should not tokenize their eating experiences with the pomp and circumstance of prescribed frivolity. It’s unfair to yourself and it’s unfair to them.
It’s also unfair to say that you can work off the sin the next day, because you can’t. The sheer number of calories you took in is not going anywhere. The bodily processes that utilize those nutrients work in ways we don’t necessarily understand yet; it’s not as simple as hopping on a stationary bike for an hour or two. Don’t sit there and guilt yourself for eating, and don’t pig out just because it’s expected. Eat the food you want and do it on your own terms. It’s not worth feeling like shit, either about yourself or in a more visceral way. There’s so much shame revolving around food to begin with; assigning it to a holiday (this among others at least) is cruel. And lastly, this is to say nothing of folks who live with food insecurity. While some of us have the ability to feast, others do not. Thankfulness need not be accompanied by gross excess.
Grappling with all of this has led me to ask: why do people like this holiday? Some people actually like the food, others enjoy visiting their families, still others like the football games (no) or the Black Friday shopping (even bigger no). I, of course, derive a perverse sort of superiority from shitting on a beloved public holiday. “I’m not like other girls,” I say to myself, “for I hate Thanksgiving.” Cue the gasps of awe and derision, both of which make a contrarian like myself thrive. An opinion that started as a way to stir the pot amongst friends and coworkers has morphed into a weird little crusade. I have become a little tiny parade of one, wherein I dress like a turkey and carry a sign that reads “all of your dreams are dead” while discoursing on the nationalist, imperialist, and consumerist nature of public holidays in a way that only the most jaded can. “I will not apologize for art,” I cry, as the people turn away from my soap boxing, disgusted with my misanthropic rants. I fully recognize that I am a caricature of myself, and I’m okay with that. Trust that I truly do look upon Thanksgiving with distaste, but that much of these quibbles are overblown for the shock value.
I like the spirited debate about good and bad Thanksgiving foods, and I get concerned about the implications the holiday has for the relationships we have with our bodies. In a society that lacks the rhythms of the cultural and religious calendars that much of the rest of the world has, we need something that tells us that time is marching forward. We also absolutely need reminders to be thankful for what we have, though we absolutely need to thank the right people for what we have. I don’t think this is a hard truth to hear. Thank the people you love for being around, whether it’s over the phone or while masked and standing six feet away. Stay happy and healthy for the upcoming holiday, and be safe (as always), thankful, perhaps, that you still have the ability to be thankful.
With all my grumbling, I’m still going to cook something a little fancy. I look at most holidays as an excuse to do something nice, just like I use my birthday or Austin’s as an excuse to make a cake. This year I’ll probably do this baked butternut thing. I’ve made it before, but peeling and breaking down a butternut is not nearly as easy as talking food heads want you to believe. That’s why I’ve only made it twice before. It’ll be fiiiiiine. I’ll also be making a cranberry curd tart because I like my vehicles for whipped cream to be tart in both form and taste.
I finished Kristin Lavransdatter. It’s left a phonebook-sized hole in my heart. I don’t know what to do with myself now that this gigantic story is done (besides rub it in Austin’s face that I finished it before he did). Because I poured so much energy into finishing it, and because I made a stress-relief listicle last week, I don’t have much in the way of interesting digital content to share with you. That said, this article was fun to read a few weeks ago after publishing my piece on fall. OH. And I almost forgot, I’m not the only one who reviles Thanksgiving! Sorry about the weird link for that, but it’s the only good source I could find for this specific podcast. It’s a quick and humorous listen, much less feral than my own sentiments.
I won’t be sliding into your inboxes next week because, even with all my soapboxing, it’s still a holiday. We should all get off our phones and do something nice for ourselves. Have a great week and celebrate safely!
Questions, comments, cries of pain? Are you enjoying what you’re reading? Do you hate it? Do you have rebuttals about Thanksgiving foods or think I forgot something? Please tell me about it! I’d love to hear from you, just reply to this email or leave comment below to talk to me about whatever! Stay safe <3