The Thanksgiving Of Our Discontent
Feelings? Bad. Stuffing? Very good!!
Hayley: It's that time of year again: the Holiday Season is upon us! And boy, what a weird one this is going to be. I got a Peppermint Mocha last week that made me cry, so clearly I'm doing very well.
I am going to be honest here, because I think that's what the readers of Gold-Plated Girls expect from us — beautiful, perfect, honest opinions: I am not a huge fan of Thanksgiving. Sorry!
I know that this is some people's favorite of the season, but for me, Thanksgiving has never quite taken off in my brain. It's like all the stress of Christmas without any of the gifts. It's the anxiety of New Year's Eve without the celebration.
Some of my favorite Thanksgivings have actually been the ones that have strayed from anything "traditional." When I was studying in France, we had a big "Thanksgiving" dinner with all of our host families in this very old and cavernous medieval building. We had salmon in puff pastry and some slices of turkey breast and whole dry baked potatoes with nothing to put on them. It was one of the funniest and most surreal experiences of my life. You can just tell that this catering staff was like what is this meal supposed to be, actually? My other favorite Thanksgiving was spent in New York and I will detail that in Tuesday's essay! Like and subscribe for more!
How do you feel about Thanksgiving, both in general and also this year?
Victoria: I love Thanksgiving. I am honestly screaming that you compared it unfavorably to New Year's Eve, which sucks so much!
But let me not get distracted. Thanksgiving is excellent. The food is good, and it's for the most part stuff you don't really eat the rest of the year. I think the thing that makes it hard for people is having to come together with family members they don't like, but you could just...not do that! A Thanksgiving with just your immediate family and one friend who couldn't go home for the holiday? Perfect.
When else do we eat stuffing?!?! Stuffing is an elite food! I have such fond memories of watching my grandma make hers and then hoarding the leftovers because it was by far my favorite thing on the table. Every year I say I'm going to incorporate more stuffing into my regular life, and every year I fail.
I used to love coming home for Thanksgiving in college. Traveling would be a bitch — it was crowded and the train or bus might be delayed — but there was always this electricity in the air. Once I reached Manhattan, I'd have to walk by Macy's to take the subway home, and seeing everything set up for the parade was always exciting.
And then when I'd do the same journey in reverse on Sunday, it would feel lowkey magical because Christmas would have popped up everywhere! I always remember leaving Union Station in DC and there'd be huge Christmas wreaths where there'd been nothing a few days earlier. It was such a magical transformation, I feel warm just thinking about it.
Another good Thanksgiving thing is Friendsgiving! In college, all of us trying to make a big Thanksgiving meal was lowkey a mess, but it was a fun mess! Freshman year we made turkey cutlets that everyone refused to eat because they weren't convinced they were fully cooked. As an adult, my friends host and I always bring stuffing and sweet potato pie and someone makes mulled wine and it's just fun! I was looking at my Instagram Story archive, and seeing photos from previous Friendsgivings made me sad!
I think the ideal way to do Thanksgiving is to make it as low-pressure as possible. This is a holiday about eating, no one should be wearing hard pants! We're feeling thankful and trying to decide how many pies are too many pies (the limit does not exist).
Of course, this year fucking sucks. I can't invite my friends who aren't going home for Thanksgiving. It's my first holiday season without my dad. It's hard not to focus on the things I can't have. But I can still have mashed potatoes, and I intend to.
What are the Schueneman plans this year?
Hayley: I knew that this was the reaction I would get for placing NYE above Thanksgiving in my holiday ranking! I will not debate you here, but I'll leave you with this: Everyone is going about NYE in completely the wrong way, and a simple mindset shift is all you need to have the most enjoyable holiday of the season.
I love your train journeys going each way and ringing in a different holiday! It feels very cinematic. When I was in college, we were on quarters so I actually had Thanksgiving through New Year's off, a full six week block of time. It was really nice to have an extended break like that, and it felt very European.
I think that Thanksgiving food is FINE. I like stuffing, obviously, I am not a monster! And the tart and tangy cranberry sauce adding a punch of flavor to every forkful is a gift. I have recently become a much more lax vegetarian and yet turkey is not on my list of things that I miss or want to eat. In fact, I have already gone on the record about how easy it is to be a vegetarian at Thanksgiving. I am spoiled anyways because my mom is an incredible cook and makes her own spin on Thanksgiving classics. This year we are going to have stuffin’ muffins (a muffin made out of stuffing that is also stuffed with a vegetarian meatball, please find a better food than that!!! You can't!!!), sweet potato wedge fries, garlic mashed potatoes, French green beans sauteed with onions and mushrooms, and the gel cranberry sauce from a can because some classics simply cannot be improved. We're also going to make a pumpkin Swiss roll and mini vegan French silk Pies. Okay, I'm officially excited now.
Friendsgiving is something that I celebrate with a circle of my closest friends from college the Saturday before actual Thanksgiving. We call it Tom Hanksgiving and watch Tom Hanks movies while we eat. On the one year that we actually tried to cook, my friend made these chocolate brownies with so much coconut oil in them that chunks of it had hardened inside and also pooled on top and we still tease her about it. It’s memories like this that I will cherish until I am very old. To make it easier on ourselves, we switched to ordering Thai food instead and now call it Thai Hanksgiving. This year it will be a virtual celebration, which makes me sad but also happy? It feels very grown-up to have this tradition with my college friends now that we're all in our 30s. Am I just a simp for the passage of time???
There was this holiday McCormick spice commercial that ran in 2018 that would make me cry literally EVERY single time it ran, so much so that my roommate would go "OH GOD" and throw her head back when it would come on. One time there was a glitch on Sling and it literally ran four times in a row and I cried the first two times, then laughed the third, then went back to crying for the fourth. Even rewatching it now I cried! I think that some of my earliest memories are of cooking with my mom, and there is so much cooking happening around the holidays that it feels even more special.
Do we love or hate the holidays because they're just a hyper-concentrated version of life? Families, friends, love, cooking, eating, drinking, celebrating, tradition — all things we experience year-round but in maximum quantity during a six-week period of time?
Victoria: Wow we are a homemade cranberry sauce family and I stand by that! I love eating it on toast in the days after Thanksgiving.
Your point about the holidays being a "hyper-concentrated version of life" is exactly right. I think this is also why people freak out about funerals and weddings, too. Like, in normal life, your relationships with people are pretty undefined. I might think you're my best friend, but to you I might just a friend, and that's fine! But then you decide to get married and not have me in your bridal party. Now, you've said "this is how good of friends we are" in a concrete way that doesn't exist in normal life. In some ways, the holidays are full of little moments like this — do I get this person a present? do I invite my cousins over? does this person get a Christmas card? I think that's where the pressure and occasional pain comes from.
Back to Thanksgiving. There are no big Thanksgiving songs, and now the Adam Sandler song doesn’t count. There is this bop, and while I make everyone I know watch it, it's not exactly a well-known smash.
There also aren't any iconic Thanksgiving movies, which is weird because it feels like such a rich thing to explore! There’s Hannah and Her Sisters, which I watched in a film class in college and loved, but I don't watch Woody Allen movies anymore. I think of You've Got Mail as Thanksgiving-y, because it has a couple of Thanksgiving scenes, but it's not really a Thanksgiving movie. I enjoyed Hollidaysburg, which takes place over a Thanksgiving break from college, but it isn't exactly well-known.
Thanksgiving does do a bit better on TV, at least. Bob's Burgers has a classic Thanksgiving episode, as do The West Wing and Gilmore Girls. I would be remiss not to mention Friends. But I think Thanksgiving episodes have grown less common as TV show seasons grow shorter and shorter.
Does Thanksgiving just need better PR?
Links Victoria Thinks You Should Click:
This episode of the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums Podcast about Taylor Swift’s Red.
This Jimmy Fallon parody for Harry Styles doing Vogue 73 Questions. I could not believe how much I enjoyed it.
I have listened to the new Bleachers song featuring BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Chinatown,” 1000 times.
If you’re feeling chilly and need something cozy, might I recommend this baked potato soup? I use onions instead of leeks because they are cheaper.
What Hayley Loves Right Now:
I made these mini dark chocolate pecan pies for my dad’s birthday this week, and they are deceptively easy and taste incredible. It made me wish I had a potluck to attend so I could bring them and show them off! I miss getting attention for things I cook!
Everything at Olive & June is 25% off and if you have been waiting to see why I am so obsessed with them, now’s the time. My nails have literally never looked or felt better.
Which, there is a therapist-approved reason why doing my nails during the pandemic has been helpful, articulated very well in this Self article.
If you need an escape from reality right now, I can’t recommend Jasmine Guillory’s romance novels enough. They’re fresh, funny, sexy, and super digestible. My personal favorite is The Proposal, but really, they’re all good.
Gold-Plated Girls comes out twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays! Don’t forget to check out Victoria’s existential Dash & Lily review from Tuesday!