It’s my second Thanksgiving, and this time I’m ready for it

This week marks my second Thanksgiving living in the United States, and I am pleased to say that I go into the holiday this year a lot less naive than I was in 2019. “We can’t make the same mistake we did last time round,” I said to my fiance gravely when it was still October. He nodded with understanding. It was he, after all, who had to stand between two men throwing punches in the line for abandoned pies at the pie shop when we’d been invited round to someone’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and blithely told to “bring a pumpkin pie”. It was he who queued for three hours in line and he who I had, in a moment of cowardice, begged to make the phone call to the pie lady because I couldn’t stand to take the brunt of her disbelief: “You left your pumpkin pie order until the day before Thanksgiving? You’d have insulted me less if you’d slaughtered my firstborn and left its dismembered corpse on my living room floor!”

Against all odds, we did get a pie last year, and against all odds it was delicious. I wasn’t expecting much from a dessert made from a root vegetable – just as I struggled to ideologically accept the existence of the popular accompaniment to Thanksgiving turkey, sweet potato casserole with marshmallows – but one can’t argue logic with one’s taste buds. I don’t know if it’s secretly just maple syrup mashed up with a bit of thickener and some orange food colouring, but the pie is delicious. So delicious, in fact, that E and I ordered one well in advance this year, not long after that October conversation. Imagining that we had to be prepared in case another last-minute invitation came our way, we ordered a particularly fancy-looking pie from a local bakery called, charmingly, Four and Twenty Blackbirds.

Needless to say, no invitation in a pandemic was forthcoming. So now we have a large twelve-person, $45 pie to eat through the long weekend. Luckily, it’s a challenge both of us are willing to accept and a burden we are willing to bravely bear.

It’s strange being a Brit living here during Thanksgiving, a holiday which I didn’t give a thought to until I was suddenly assaulted by its presence via multiple turkey-themed decorations and supermarket displays. To Americans, Thanksgiving is as important as Christmas, if not more so: the Thursday dinner is sacred family time, followed by a Friday off to recover and a weekend spent with parents who may well live hours across the country by plane. Christmas Day itself is seen as much more casual – one of my American friends has spaghetti bolognese with her family every Christmas, much to the horror of the Brits who she announced this to – and Boxing Day isn’t a national holiday. If people are going to travel to see anyone, they do it in November, and then might settle for a Christmas with friends if travel in December is too hard to work out.

Though it’s not my holiday, I do find myself swept up a little in the “Happy holidays!” fervour that surrounds Turkey Day. After all, I gave up one of my favourite British holidays to move here – Bonfire Night – and I can’t really convince people to join me in a token celebration of it because every time I say “It’s like Independence Day except you burn effigies of a famous Catholic on a pyre!”, people look at me with wide, frightened eyes and move quickly away. Thanksgiving is, of course, problematic in itself – just ask any Native American – but it’s the problematic holiday I’ve swapped out for remember-remembering the 5th of November, and it seems like a fair trade. 

I’ll be tucking in to the mac and cheese and the garlic potatoes and a bowl of sauteed brussels sprouts and a pumpkin spice cocktail and a nice, oblong tofurky this year to accompany my hard-won pie because I need a bit of variety in my life after months of lockdown and economical rice and beans. Yes, I’ll be watching the Thanksgiving Dog Show and the (now digital) Macy’s Day Parade. And yes, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on Donald Trump’s traditional turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House.

The only thing I won’t be doing is crowding the streets of the Covid testing centres like all the other New Yorkers desperate to be declared free and healthy before they drive across the country to see their elderly relatives this year. And as I watch them shivering in the cold in their puffy coats and hats, I can’t help but feel a little grateful that, for me, Turkey Day comes with no strings attached.