No, this was well into the 90s
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You knocked loose a memory, but not of a childhood Thanksgiving. One year about 30 years ago, a cousin of mine who is about 10 years younger than I wanted to host our fathers’ side of the family, which was probably 15-18 people at the time. They had just gotten married the year before, and had never hosted anything to our knowledge. Everything was wonderful: the meal and the decor were picture perfect, but the star of the show was the mashed potatoes. They were rich, fluffy, and decadent. Cousin’s wife used an ungodly amount of butter and cream cheese in the potatoes. We were left with impression that Alisa was quite the cook.
Over the years, I would share recipes and prep ideas with Alisa, and she’d take them. She’d ask questions, but looking back on it, she never really contributed to those conversations. A couple of years ago, she admitted that she’s not really that much into cooking, which is why they’d not hosted anything since! That one experience was a trial balloon for them, and even though it was a success by nearly every measure, it wasn’t one they wanted to repeat.
It turns out that what she’s really good at is research. She’s a published writer, and reads a LOT. She read just about everything she could get her hands on about making a Thanksgiving dinner and especially the pitfalls to avoid. She developed a plan and executed it without a hitch, but it was something she didn’t really enjoy.
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Oh the pressure! Glad to hear there was valium available!
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My mother is from Connecticut and my father is from Alabama, and I grew up in New Hampshire. Since my mother’s family was closest, we spent most holidays with them, which usually shook out to Thanksgiving at our house and Christmas at my aunt and uncle’s in CT. I have a feeling it worked out like that because I grew up in a Colonial farmhouse that had been converted into a boarding house in the early 20th century, on 17 acres of fields and woods with a lot of old fruit trees and grape vines and stone walls and two barns and a chicken coop, which with the right adornments is all pretty fucking autumnal. There was a “secret passage” that was really just a non-obvious door in a bedroom that had been turned into my father’s office, and which opened from the main part of the house to where the boarders used to board, so if you were shooed away from the kitchen, you could go upstairs “to play in my room” or “get something,” walk into his office (if you run, you’ll be heard), open the door and creep through the boarding house part, down those stairs, open the door from the boarding house kitchen to the laundry room, and quietly get a canister of Poppycock or a bag of snacks of some kind from the pantry, as long as everyone in the kitchen had their backs turned.
On that side of the family, I have five cousins, plus my aunt’s sister and her husband and two kids, plus my grandparents, and occasionally a boyfriend or girlfriend of one of the cousins, all of whom are older than me. Point being, it was a big group. We had a dining room table, but even with the extra leaves it wasn’t big enough, so we had a ping pong table that we used when the crowd was at its peak. (It had a tablecloth, don’t worry.)
My grandmother’s birthday is in late November, so typically my grandparents would arrive a day or two before Thanksgiving, my grandmother would help with prep, and we’d have her favorite dishes—spaghetti and meatballs and lemon meringue pie on Wednesday as a birthday celebration for her. I would occasionally be scolded because I preferred my southern grandmother’s lemon meringue pie (sweetened condensed milk) to my northern grandmother’s (cornstarch, I think, though we might have used My-T-Fine pudding and pie filling). My mother had special festive plates with turkeys and a cornucopia on them, and turkey-themed napkins, so we would get those out the night before and see if they needed washing or dusting or anything. (I just helped her move into a retirement community this summer, I think she gave those away to relatives ages ago.)
I graduated from high school a little early, so I did have one Thanksgiving of doing the movie thing of going out and seeing all your “old friends,” i.e. the people I had been in high school with a year earlier and who were still in high school like a bunch of schmucks, while I was a full two and a half months into college. This was southern New Hampshire in the pre-coffeehouse 90s, so you know where I went. That’s right: the Denny’s smoking section.
We always had turkey; pretty standard gravy; Pepperidge Farm blue bag stuffing with celery, onion, sage sausage, and Bell’s seasoning (in the bird); mashed potatoes; sweet potato casserole (whipped sweet potatoes, pecan streussel topping); peas canned from the garden (bleh); creamed pearl onions (bleh); canned cranberry sauce; a Jello salad or two from my southern grandmother’s recipes (lime jello with shredded carrot and crushed pineapple was a big one, as was a red jello of some kind with bananas and I think raspberries and sour cream or cottage cheese); and three or four pies, which always included apple (this is New England! and I grew up in a town with a lot of orchards) and pumpkin. Sometimes pecan.
One year we raised our own turkey. We’d always raised chickens (mostly I did), and a neighbor had somehow, well … acquired a baby turkey, and thought we could add it to the flock? Which we did, and that bird got huge, and we used to get complaints from a certain neighbor that their German shepherd was scared of it, so when it came time to … um, to eat it, well, it didn’t fit in the oven. I mean it could not physically be put into the oven, whole. By weird coincidence, a different neighbor two doors in the other direction had opened a catering business after her air traffic controller husband was fired by Reagan, so we roasted her turkey and she roasted ours in her catering oven.
It was … look, I know how it sounds … but it was a delicious turkey.
I didn’t grow up with green bean casserole and I’m not sure was even aware of it until my twenties, though my little brother now loves it.
Appetizers sitting on the sideboard while we waited for the turkey to be ready were celery sticks with various fillings, mainly those Kraft canned cheeses like Roka blue (bleh) and the pineapple one (fine); dates stuffed with peanut butter and rolled in sugar (my favorite); candied walnuts that my grandmother made, or that someone else would make from her recipe; and applets and cotlets, though I don’t think we called them that.
Despite my father being from Alabama, we almost never watched football when I was growing up—so little of it, in fact, that a) I did not know that people who were not attending the school in question paid attention to college sports until UMass made it to the Final Four while I was in college at neighboring Hampshire; and b) I did not even realize it was unusual to have a non-football-watching father from Alabama. Depending on which cousins had come, they might be watching football on the “grown-ups’ TV” (the bigger newer one that didn’t have a coat hanger for an antenna). Otherwise we were watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and playing video games (the Odyssey 2 originally, which I will be surprised if anyone remembers, and eventually a Nintendo). Or “going outside to play in the field,” which was really me providing an excuse for my older cousins to go outside and smoke, and yet they fooled me every time.
Thanksgiving night meant picking apart the carcass, putting together Tupperware containers of leftovers for people, and making turkey and rice soup. I kept that up for a while (wild rice instead of regular rice, because it doesn’t get as soggy), but scandalized my mother by throwing away the meat I’d made stock with and adding different, still flavorful meat to the soup instead.
And of course there were sandwiches, though I didn’t grow up putting cranberry sauce on them. This, actually, is probably the most important part of our Thanksgivings now, the sandwiches. I alternate back and forth between sandwiches with cranberry (and often sharp cheddar) and sandwiches with butter or truffle butter, something we started because my wife doesn’t like fruit or fruit sauces on sandwiches. Sometimes I add schmaltz made with the turkey fat to the sandwiches, or crisped turkey skin (because when turkey is this cheap, why not buy a couple extra, use the meat and bones for stock, and crisp up the skin for sandwiches?) (We also always make cranberry sauce from scratch now, because it’s such an easy thing to tinker with. Finger limes, calamansi, etc. I think we decided on adding guava paste this year.)
We tapped our maple trees and made our own syrup—cf. pretty fucking autumnal—so if there was anyone we weren’t expecting to see for Christmas, we’d give them jars of homemade maple syrup, and sometimes if people were staying the night, we’d crack into those the next day and make pancakes.
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Wow! Thanks for sharing those memories of times gone by.
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Mine too!
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“pretty fucking autumnal” indeed!
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One of the hospitals used to have two jello type salads EVERY Thanksgiving and Christmas. One was composed of a mixture of green jello, diced pears and cottage cheese, similar to one called ‘Under the sea’ Another was cranberry, cherry or raspberry jello, orange zest and chopped pecans, and I like that one. I always worked the holidays there and that is all I remember of the foods we prepared. Oh, there were plates of sliced Bartlett pears and jack cheese. I wasn’t big on the turkey-potato-stuffing thing and I hated gravy in those days. Hospital food has come a long way in 50 years!
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When I was a kid the closest rural hospital hired ladies from the local Amish community to run the cafeteria.
Not sure how healthy but it was packed nonstop…the food waa delicious.
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Most probably the first Thanksgiving I remember took place at my paternal grandparent’s home in small town northern Utah. Grandad’s heritage was English, and my grandma’s was Danish. The food was well cooked and delicious, but quite basic, and never highly seasoned. My grandparents didn’t have much, but she did have some nice wedding dishes, and ivory handled silverware from England in the 1920’s. She always put out her best for family dinners, on her large dining room table, (which was actually in the living room) with a smallish matching sideboard but I don’t recall food being put on it for serving. Food was passed at the table when it was time. Before meal time, the women were busy in the tiny kitchen, getting it all ready, with the big pack of kids jumping on the old iron beds in the basement, playing hide and seek, (I got concussed one time on the cement walls playing that game), and getting into spats with the cousins. There were 19 of us kids, and 14 adults! One bathroom only lol. When it came time to go upstairs, the tables would be ready, with the adults at the big table & the kids at the kitchen table, and as many folding tables as needed. Very aconsisting o sweet pickles, bread and butter pickles, and of course black olives. We had a blast putting them all on our fingers when the adults weren’t watching! I don’t remember any other appetizers ever. The main was of course turkey, and I’m thinking probably two needed to be cooked for the size of the crowd. Stuffing in the bird, mashed potatoes, delicious gravy, candied sweet potatoes, probably canned green beans, and jellied cranberry sauce from the can, removed whole, with the ridges still intact. Then as soon as everyone had room, it was pie time. There was always pumpkin, cherry, probably apple, and mincemeat with actual meat in it. The adults had coffee and chatted, but doled out money to us kids so we could walk to the theatre to see a movie that the youngest of us couldn’t understand, like Goldfinger or something. I can only imagine the elders’ relief that the young in’s cleared out for awhile, as cleanup was completed, and grown up business was discussed. As far as I can remember, I never heard any arguing or yelling amongst them, nor do I remember any kitchen catastrophes either. Good simple times for the kids to remember. I’ll post more about my nuclear family’s many varied Turkey Days. 
Edited to add: my young, glamourus (sic) aunt made the most fabulous yeasted potato rolls, so heavenly they were my favorite thing at the table.
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ONE bathroom!
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Yes, can you believe it? One time there was even a diaper or training pants in the toilet, which I actually flushed accidentally! The men folk probably fished it out. This was probably late fifties and into the 60’s, well before disposable diapers I think. Oh the memories! 
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Yuck
The things people think are ok to put in toilets is astounding. Kitty litter, for example 
Not to get too graphic, but the diaper/training pants were in the toilet briefly to get the poop out, and I didn’t see them, or know any better than to flush. Oh the things we remember. 
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The relish tray! A fashion back in the day. I’d forgotten that we even had a HO thread about it: Old Fashioned Relish Tray Foods.
I remember my grandmother had a sectioned pressed glass dish, meant to look like crystal, specifically for that purpose. I remember that dish holding plain celery sticks and those canned black olives, which went mostly ignored before Thanksgiving dinner. (I’m sure the celery and olives were repurposed later because we didn’t waste food.) I was still a wee one when my grandmother stopped including a relish tray on the Thanksgiving table. Nobody in the family was very enthusiastic about it, including her. No other appetizers were served though—everything went into the main event.
The funny thing is that I washed and dusted that relish tray dish for many years afterward as part of deep cleaning my grandmother’s/mother’s china cabinet.
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It’s not a childhood memory but treasured nonetheless…
When we lived in France, we vowed to have a Thanksgiving celebration (on Saturday) to hold an important cultural holiday for us and our offspring.
The first year we invited some new friends (wed been there just 6 weeks)…he is from Wyoming. We had a wonderful day.
The next year our friend circle had grown…and I will forget standing in thr kitchen with my friend from Buffalo. She’d married a French man, and hadn’t celebrated in almost 20 years.
As we stood there, we were surrounded by pots and pans and dishes. Waves of laughter poured in from thr dining room (we were up to about 20 at that point), broken by the thundering of the kids clamoring up and down stairs playing. She looked at me and hopped up and down and said, “It’s a REAL Thanksgiving!”
We were up to 40 by the time we came back to the States and it makes me deeply happy that she still hosts Thanksgiving for our friends all these years later.
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Grandma embraced the relish tray for as long as she held family dinners. Towards the end of her life, she still had gatherings, but not nearly as many, and of course the grandkids grew up, and many of us moved away, so the crowd was much smaller. So happy to have those memories. Oh, and she had a big round platter, which I’m sure was glass, but it had the different sections for stuff. I never had to dust it though lol.
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My parents were good cooks. Relish tray. Sherry during cooking. The turkey was basted with red wine and butter. The mashed potatoes were perfect. The dressing was cornbread pecan and excellent. My father’s taste in wines ran to whites. Dessert was two pies, one with fork pricked TM and the other with fork pricked TM: 'tis mince and 't’ain’t mince. The rolls were usually those kind of crusty sourdough roll you can hollow out and load with butter if you are an impolite kid.
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What is pricked TM?
