9am. This year, the turkey is going into the oven at 9 am, because I am a responsible adult who can make that happen.
And I’m not beginning the process at 9 - nope, that’s when the actual turkey is going into the oven.
The pre-heated oven.
So I’ll turn that on at 8:45. And the turkey will have to be prepared with the twine and the salt and the pepper, so I’ll start that at 8:30.
The second thing to do on Thanksgiving morning is to start slowly simmering onions and celery and sage in olive oil…fill the house with delicious anticipation. (The first thing is coffee, or a hot beverage of any kind.) I’ll get that going at 8, before the chopping and preparing and…
…oh. De-frosting.
I should probably get to that now.
It occurs to me that responsible adults get less sleep than less responsible adults. If my morning schedule keeps creeping backward to meet my night-before schedule (full of pies and rolls and maybe another pie just for fun) then I’ll be getting up before I go to sleep.
But this is my element. So often these days I feel that I’m not part of the algorithm; I don’t know the dances on my phone or the songs being danced to, and I’d never wear that sweater even though Amazon swears they picked it “just for me” - Pinterest is confused by me and Instagram thinks I’m a cat lady living in the UK. Thanksgiving soothes me, it is familiar and navigable; all I have to do is cook and eat and I can do those things.
I used to be in charge of an art department, and every year around this time we would try to do something bonding. One year I thought we could make those pictures of turkeys where you trace around your hand and add feathers and a beak and a waddle; during our morning meeting we all took markers and sheets of paper and collectively doodled while we empowered Corporate America. But one young woman was deeply suspicious, then disgusted, and finally very, very angry about the other 32 people doing this.
“How is it supposed to look??” she asked.
“Like this.” said five of her co-workers, holding up, y’know, basically tracings of the outside of whichever wasn’t their dominant hand.
The woman turned on me with fire in her eyes. “And how will these be judged???” she literally spat at me.
“They WON’T be judged… they’re just for fun, like we did when we were kids!” I found out, later, that she had recently graduated from art school, where vicious peer reviews had scarred her deeply. She eventually stopped glaring at me every time she saw me, and we both even laughed about it… like, seven years later.
My favorite bonding project was a cookbook, where people volunteered either their favorite or least favorite holiday recipes, and in some cases the stories behind these recipes. I still have my copy: there is German potato salad and enchiladas and lutefisk and something involving squirrel, which I was told was a joke in the way that you know that it wasn’t. The favorite and least favorite thing proved that it isn’t necessarily the taste of holiday dishes as much as their familiarity… you can count on looking forward to some foods and look forward to avoiding others.
The only recipe that is never familiar is gravy; it’s more of a… a feeling, really. I like to try to do something new every year, and the gravy is a safe experimentation dish, which can be salvaged (most of the time) if things go sideways. Last year my daughter put herself in charge of it, and it was incredible, and none of us have the slightest recollection as to how it was accomplished.
This year, for various reasons, I am feeling risk averse, and instead have learned a new fact: that the woman who wrote the rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is responsible for American Thanksgiving, having written impassioned letters to five US Presidents (it was Lincoln who finally took her advice). She wrote books and edited magazines and had five kids and lived ’til 90. And the first audio recording in America by Thomas Edison on his new phonograph machine? “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, by Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman responsible for me getting up at 8 o’clock this Thursday morning.
Maybe 7:30.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The Early Bird.