Thanksgiving

 This is what this Thanksgiving (and Thanksgiving Eve last night) is:


- An amazing Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of our wonderful friend Erica. We're talking ALL the food and the sides, and she is an amazing cook. Served up on a table that is set with our fancy china and beautifully crafted pottery, because that's how we roll. A bottle of wine from Biltmore.



- A toast to our friends Carrie and Jason and their amazing kids. If we are in town, we almost always spend Thanksgiving there, and I missed that mightily this year.


- Watching some Mandolorian and part 1 ("Mangrove") of the Small Axe series. And then watching the Taylor Swift special on the making of Folklore, which has kind of been a pandemic soundtrack for me. With almost no opportunities for live art, we've been watching more streaming. Working in media with FilmNorth, this is probably good for me. I've certainly learned more/been exposed to more.


-  Playing Killer Bunnies, a fire, a hot tub.



- My sherpa-lined onesie, of course.


-  Another set of voter postcards out to Georgia, and listening to wonderful Thanksgiving words from our President-elect.


-  Streaming yoga from the amazing Viv and Yoga and a Pint this morning. The dogs love it.




- A quick trip to Oakland Cemetery, to visit my mom's grave and those of the Chapin family, who built our house.


- Family reading time. I'm reading a great book about Minnesota women in WWII.


-  Putting up Christmas lights and listening to Christmas music (currently If The Fates Allow by the Hadestown cast, which is amazing.) Yes, it's a little early, and I don't care.


- Dropping off a plate of food for my father in law. Texting friends and family.


---


My relationship to Thanksgiving is very complicated. When I was in college, and when I lived abroad for years afterwards, I never went home for the holiday; it was too expensive. In all my years at Jeune Lune, we always opened a show the day after Thanksgiving, and so it was a kind of fleeting holiday. The year my mom died, though she died on Christmas Day, it was Thanksgiving where it was clear she would not make it, and so it's been a holiday of dread for me since then (that's why, if we're not with Carrie and Jason, we have escaped over the weekend, to New Orleans, Las Vegans, London, Chicago.)


I'm really sorry for all the people to whom a scaled-back Thanksgiving was hard this year. But I hope they felt the same kind of quiet peace we did.






Comments

Meredith said…
Fun fact about Hadestown: my cousin's son (Liam Robinson) is the music director for the show he is close friends with the writer and has been working on it from the beginning - including pre-Broadway shows in Toronto and London. He is the piano player in to band onstage .
November 27, 2020 at 12:14 PM
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