A New-fangled Thanksgiving Dinner
When it came to Thanksgiving dinner in Lawton, Oklahoma, my mom was in charge...at least, she thought she was!
In a changing world that created new stress by the minute, we could always depend on Mom’s turkey to be perfectly browned, and her cornbread dressing nicely laced with celery, raisins, and wild pecans. The pecans were picked off the ground around the parking strip at St. Mary’s Catholic Church across the street when no one was looking. I often thought no one would care. Everyone else got their pecans at The Fat Pig anyway. The domestic pecans had a thinner shell and were much easier to shell. Mom and her sisters had been stealing the wild pecans from the church since they were kids. Maybe the possibility of being chased by the nuns swinging their switches brought back childhood memories of when money was tight and their sack of pecans was an important contribution to the turkey dinner.
Giblet gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peas filled in every spare spot on our plate. There were no tortillas on this day—I suspect because there just wasn’t enough free counter space in the kitchen to roll them out. The rolls we ate were packaged in a paper tray and were already partially cooked. The cranberry sauce that replaced the normal salsa was canned and always served on our fancy glass tray that had been around since Roosevelt put a turkey in every pot (or was that a chicken?). Okay, so it wasn’t a gourmet meal, but it was good—and the large family that came to share it thought it was perfect. Almost every time.
But one year, when my mom and her sister were both close to eighty, my Aunt Pat arrived from California with a suitcase stuffed with her new-fangled ideas about tradition. Thanksgiving morning, she got up early and beat my mom to the kitchen, determined to “California-ize” our turkey dinner. The first item on the menu that she changed was the cranberries—she used real ones.
Mom was suspicious when she looked at the marble-sized fruit bubbling on the stove with bits of fresh orange peel. She didn’t like the looks of those orange shavings. To her, they looked like something that slipped past the food inspectors. Mom believed cranberry sauce should be pushed out of a can with those little ridges that showed her where to cut the slices. She even had a special crystal plate designed to serve it that had been passed down in the family for years. “No one will know what this stuff is.” she worried. “This isn’t what they’re used to. And it smells funny.”
My aunt stood her ground. Resigned to a cranberry failure, Mom went to the living room to relax and read the paper. She didn’t see my aunt pull my mom’s traditional cornbread dressing out of the oven and stir in a bag of fresh spinach. The last thing my aunt did before she left the kitchen was to replace the table butter with an unidentified soy product she’d brought in her handbag from Santa Barbara that didn’t look, taste, or smell like butter.
The family was sitting down at the table when Mom pulled the dressing out of the oven and discovered that it’d turned green! Her sister told her it was the latest thing in California, and much healthier. Mom was appalled and predicted, “No one will eat it.” And they didn’t. That bowl was passed around the table so often it looked like it was in its own unique green orbit, and no one would touch it.
On one of its last flights around the table, my cousin Trude reluctantly put a spoonful on her toddler’s plate, but the kid broke out in tears, so my cousin took it off and hid it in her napkin. Finally, my aunt mumbled something about taking the dressing to the kitchen to heat it up. It never returned.
The fancy cranberry sauce met much the same fate. When it was passed around the table, everyone would try to get a portion that was not laced with orange peel. No one succeeded. Soon it entered its own orbit, crisscrossing the orbit of the green cornbread dressing. Around and around the table it flew until the contents of the bowl were just a fragrant red blur circling the Planet Table, not unlike the rings around Saturn.
Mom and her sister are both gone now, and I think of them often, especially around the holidays. Looking back, maybe green dressing and orange cranberries wouldn’t have been that awful. I should have at least tasted them. Although, sister rivalry being what it was, I’m sure Mom would have never forgiven me if I had.
It has been years since that dinner, but the saga of the New-Fangled Thanksgiving Tradition lives on to this day. No one in our family will accept an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner without first inquiring, “What’s in your cranberries—and what color is your cornbread dressing?”
Happy Thanksgiving! May there be no green or red planets circling your holiday table!
Thanks Cheyenne!