Counting Down to Thanksgiving

Yes, Halloween is the No. 1 holiday in these parts. We've already started counting down to next year's candy-filled, horror-drenched extravaganza (343 days to be precise. We even have a countdown calendar in our kitchen that helps us focus).

But Thanksgiving. That holds a special place.

It's a holiday without gifts or treats. It's not about scoping out sweet treasures. It's more about looking inward than out. (And if that doesn't smack of Jung and Joseph Campbell, baby, then I'm just not doing my job here.)

Now if you know me, and you know the seriousness with which I take adventure seeking (in that literary-not-literal sort of way), then you can fairly and verily predict how we started this holiday.

By watching Star Wars.

(And if you have to ask why, then you need to go back and read your Heroes with a Thousand Faces, because I have somewhere to go here, people, and I just don't have the time to spell out that logic and the complete OBVIOUSNESS of our choice for you. Puh-lease! And, no. I will not apologize for my flagrant and aggressive use of caps-lock. It is the holiday season after all and must get my game on if I'm to survive Black Friday. Stay with me.)

So today, on the eve of Thanksgiving, we continued our tradition by grocery shopping for Thursday's feast. Yes, we started the shopping today. (We planned the menu yesterday, cribbed from several articles in this year's Thanksgiving issue of Food and Wine. ) And yes, we did get everything we needed for our Indian-spiced turkey breast, our curry-roasted butternut squash and chickpeas, our creamed spinach, our creamed onions with thyme and sage, our pear and gruyere pie.

(I should've bulleted that list. I'm working through those issues.)

Yes, our traditions could be read as bordering unconventional, or even misguided. We don't watch Miracle on 34th Street or eat my mom's stuffing or rocked-out spicy spinach casserole that I've eaten and loved and pined over nearly every year (save maybe three) of my past 37. We aren't spending this Thanksgiving with my sisters or my cousins.

No. Instead, we watch Star Wars and Shark Boy and Lava Girl as our holiday flicks. (And they make perfect holiday sense to us--finding a family when far away from home, expressing gratitude for the simple things that we spend each day diligently taking advantage of.) We cook and eat food that has never graced a family Thanksgiving menu; that, this year, doesn't even resonate with our cultures, however far removed we are from them.

Part of that is by design. Most of it isn't.

Several years ago, when Bear and I were living in Bloomington and couldn't afford to travel to spend Thanksgiving with family, we tried to recreate my mom's Thanksgiving dinner. We laughed as carved the finished turkey and found a bag of gizzards hidden in some secret turkey compartment. We struggled and sweated (salt is good seasoning) over my mom's spinach casserole. We grappled with the sense memory of her stuffing. (She makes it by taste, not by measurements.)

I remember calling my mom every 2o minutes or so--I was far from an accomplished boiler of hot dog (which I've since learned should never be boiled), much less executor of an entire T-day menu.

We thought that recreating my mom's menu, dish by dish, teaspoon by teaspoon, would be a good way to recreate home, to vicariously share a little piece of the holiday with my family when we were living so far away.

We've wised up.

Home should be where you are, not where you want to be. Traditions should be as much personal as they are historical.

And there's nothing, not even perfectly executed cornbread stuffing, that takes the place of spending the holidays with your family (even when mom mistakes salt for sugar in her pumpkin pie.)

I miss you.