It's All About the Food

Thanksgiving? No thanks!

More and more, Thanksgiving has become a distraction -- nay, an impediment -- to my real goal for November: preparing for Christmas.

This may be my husband's favorite holiday, but my own feeling is must I? For various reasons -- four sets of parents, the only grandchild, an unwillingness to eat the same food every year -- we've hosted Thanksgiving since before we were married.

Thanksgiving was so early this year it completely blindsided me. One weekend I'm baking fruitcake, the next I'm making a grocery list over breakfast so that I can make cranberry sauce that afternoon.

On the pro side, the house will finally get a spring cleaning, the refrigerators are cleared out and cleaned, and I know it won't be the same menu as last year and the year before and the year before (if only because I change the side dishes). Our families are great, and we don't see them enough. Everyone enjoys themselves enough to return every year. It is a four-day weekend. And I control the menu.

As the child of divorced parents, I have few holiday traditions, since each holiday changed from year to year. The allure of Thanksgiving was always the chance to throw a big dinner party -- albeit with a mandatory turkey. Unfortunately, as I've found recipes that everyone likes and are easy enough to make and would disappoint someone if they were missing, the menu is starting to fossilize. I'm fighting back with two new side dishes, but it's hard when most of my thoughts turn to Nick Malgieri's cookbooks.

(I have an extra bag of cranberries, maybe I will make the cranberry-chocolate tart from November's Bon Appetit and shake up dessert. Wait, it calls for mascarpone cheese. Maybe not. Next year, the stuffing definitely gets a makeover.)

On the minus side, I'd planned to bake pfefferkuchen and lebkuchen, but spent the weekend cleaning. The only baking was corn muffins for breakfast, and pre-making and freezing crust for the pumpkin pie.

Maybe if I just brought three or four desserts, I could relinquish control of Thanksgiving. And I wouldn't have to clean.