Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and no one seems fully prepared for the holiday this year. “I don’t know if this is an excuse,” my aunt said to me today, “but because Thanksgiving was so late this year, it threw everything off.”
My grandmother has echoed this sentiment, blaming her sparse holiday decor on the late Thanksgiving, too. “I usually have an extra weekend to get all my things out,” she told me while chopping celery this afternoon. I don’t know what she’s talking about — all eighteen stockings (for eighteen grandchildren) are on display. All thirty nutcrackers (no numerical reason) are lined up against the stairs. The only thing missing is the real Christmas tree this year (but she still has two other trees on display!)
Maybe it is an excuse, but I agree: Thanksgiving came too late and Christmas came too soon. I’m fond of turkey day always falling around November 23rd — this would be my ideal calendar. Then we would have a full month to prepare for Christmas and the bitter approach of winter weather.
Other than that delightful first-snow this past Saturday, everything has been kind of off this season. It started with me getting a cold right before Thanksgiving. I’ve learned, with experience, not to power through a cold: I take twice as long to recover when I do this. So I nixxed my plans to cook the Thanksgiving dinner and placed a phone call to one of our favorite local restaurants. They had been advertising take-out-turkey-dinners all over their Instagram for weeks. I figured it was worth a shot.
Having spent time working in Manhattan’s bustling food scene, I’m aware that it’s not uncommon for New Yorkers to order Thanksgiving dinners from restaurants. New York apartments are small with even smaller stoves: the bird doesn’t always fit in the oven! And it doesn’t make sense to cook a big, turkey dinner for one or two people. It’s very expensive to buy all those ingredients that will only end up being thrown out in a few days when it becomes difficult to keep up with all those leftovers. Yes, yes, I told myself like some agreeable villain. Ordering take-out-turkey-dinner is good for your wallet and your home. And besides, you’re in no condition to cook a meal, you walking petri dish of germs and filth. So a little less self deprecatingly, I settled into my bed feeling settled by this decision. Takeout was the best move.
As my cold began to clear, so did my common sense, apparently. I started to think of the takeout as a significant luxury. I told my mom, I have compassion for you — I don’t even have to clean up the mess this year. I told my husband, we can actually relax this Thanksgiving because I’m not on the turkey’s schedule!
I imagined fantastical developments to fill the time of the now open day: perhaps I would take up a hobby of whittling soap or venture into creating macaroni art for my bare walls. Maybe Aleksa would fish through the closet for the pink yoga mat I swear I bought two years ago and I would finally take up this “at-home pilates” thing people keep telling me to try. Maybe I’d learn the entirety of the Serbian language with that day, who could say? All I knew was that takeout Thanksgiving was the best invention ever.
And then that fateful Thursday came. Aleksa and I woke up at 11:30 A.M. — the norm for Aleksa, but not the norm for me. I woke up panicked and shot out of bed making the same face as Kevin McAlister in Home Alone: ahhh! Started by me, Aleksa shot up out of bed, too. In an inharmonious fashion, we raced around our apartment trying to make sense of ourselves and the morning that already escaped us.
I was in an unpleasant mood. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always, always, watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV at 9:00 in the morning. It’s just tradition. I had the privilege of going one time in person. (The year was 2008 and Miley Cyrus had her own float; I delusionally wore a mint-green sparkly sweater from the girls’ store, Justice, because I was sure it would get me seen on TV as one of those happy, frostbitten kids waving at the camera crew.)
And one time, in the seventh grade, my friend Alyssa spent the night before Thanksgiving at my house. We probably stayed up late to talk about everything and anything that seventh grade girls discuss. But I still woke up at 9 A.M. to watch the now-cancelled Matt Lauer announce the Pikachu float coming down Broadway.
Everyone familiar with the Macy’s Parade knows that the whole thing wraps up by noon. So waking up at 11:30 A.M. deeply upset me. I watched the remaining thirty minutes with my arms crossed and my brow furrowed, annoyed with myself for waking up late.
“You know, the Peacock channel will be playing a loop of the parade for the next seven hours for those who missed it, right?” Aleksa told me in his too-patient voice. “It’s not the same,” I grumbled, even though I knew I would accept this pallid gesture and skip out on the infamous post-parade-dog-show this year.
On TV, Santa came out on his big, red sleigh and waved goodbye, promptly ending the Macy’s production. And then, on the Peacock channel, the parade started over: Billy Porter easing on down the rode to open the parade. I thought to myself that this is what those Californians must do — they must watch the rerun, because surely they’re not getting up at 6 A.M. to watch the parade, right? (But then again, maybe if you live in California you don’t give a damn about a New York City parade.)
After I watched the parade’s rerun (as the fake fan I now was) I headed out with Aleksa to pick up our turkey dinner. My cold was mostly gone by this point, so it felt nice to step outside for a walk in the cool air; the pavement, wet from rain, slick under my tall boots.
I thought to myself, this is lovely weather … but it’s not Thanksgiving weather. If you ask me, Thanksgiving weather should be gray and chilly or a crisp 60s day with sun. There should still be red, orange, and yellow leaves on the trees. There should be absolutely no rain. This was another sign that the day was surely amiss.
When we began to unwrap the takeout bags at home, I initially thought that they forgot to give us some items. This is when it dawned on me that takeout Thanksgiving might not be what I had dreamt it to be. When your whole day is hinging on one delicious meal, it’s not great when the portions appear insultingly small.
The worst offender was the infamous “pumpkin cheesecake with maple-whipped cream” they had advertised all over Instagram. We opened the nearly-flat plastic containers to find a square slice of cheesecake no bigger than a half-dollar coin … with no whipped cream on top.
Whatever, I thought. If it tastes good, it shouldn’t matter that the portions are meant for hamsters. But we were intimidated, anyway. Aleksa and I slowly sat down in front of the foil containers that we were about to eat from. I mean this literally: we slowly lowered ourselves onto our seats while staring down at the food. As if the food were a dog that might bite us if we moved too quickly toward it. We maintained suspicion of its good nature, uncertain how to act around this thing I had set in motion with so much build up and anticipation. What if the food was awful?
I had attempted to take the food out of the foil-containers and arrange everything nicely on plates. I thought that maybe presentation was the issue: maybe if it felt more like a home-cooked meal, presented on blue china plates, the meal could look like a regal spread found in a Nancy Meyers film. Or at the very least, if the half-dollar-coin-cheesecake-slices were placed in the center of a dessert plate, they would appear to be a normal size.
But it became clear to me that attempting a presentation would be more trouble than it was worth: the soupy mashed potatoes could not be presented in any handsome way. The limp vegetables and scrabbly stuffing appeared pathetic and unappetizing in the foil container all on its own.
Everything, and I mean everything, was horrible about the meal. My turkey was mostly dark meat (I’m not a fan of turkey in the first place) and brimming with fat and bones. The mashed sweet potatoes were watery, and therefore, contaminating the other terrible sides. The stuffing, for some reason, had spicy sausage and bacon bits and cranberries in it. The flavors didn’t gel together. There was also the strange inclusion of steamed cauliflower and carrots on the side. I’ve never seen steamed cauliflower on a Thanksgiving plate in my life.
The more I tried to muscle through this mess, the more I began to feel nauseous. I don’t know if it was the textures, the tastes, the appearance or the way it was all coming together in my stomach, but it was inedible. I hit my breaking point and pushed the tin-foil plate away from me in a toddler-like manner. “I can’t do it,” I said. I finally broke character — someone pretending to enjoy their meal for the sake of not ruining it for the other person.
Defeatedly, Aleksa put his fork down. “It’s disgusting,” he agreed. We both started laughing. How could our favorite restaurant fail us so badly? What went wrong? I bemoaned the ninety-dollar loss and my stupid cold while throwing everything out and settling on popcorn (I guess we had one fourth of Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving dinner — no buttered toast, jellybeans, or milkshakes, unfortunately). We tore apart our cabinets for whatever snacks and delectable treats had become lost between the jars of peanut butter and oatmeal packets.
We had an equally bad Black Friday: we left our local shopping plaza after twenty minutes due to the lack of sales and crowds of people. I began to feel ridiculously disappointed in how our holiday weekend was shaping up. I’m someone who can’t just let things roll off my back when they don’t go as I had hoped. I think about it for a long time: how it could have been better or what we should have done instead.
Triumphantly, I decided that I would not give up just yet. That we’d turn the holiday weekend around. And we did just that: we went to see Wicked that night in 3D (thanks, Aleksa, for being a good sport) and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular the following evening (which Aleksa genuinely loved). Early Sunday morning, I brought all my cookbooks into bed with me (Aleksa still sleeping beside us) and composed a grocery list that would work for a two-person Thanksgiving.
That evening, I set the table the way I had initially envisioned for the holiday and put out all the fruits of my labor: garlic-rosemary roasted potatoes, traditional stuffing, corn muffins, cranberry sauce and a maple-glazed chicken. For dessert, we had both apple and pumpkin pie — decently sized slices this time.
I’m really grateful that we were able to turn around the weekend and have the kind of holiday we wanted. But I don’t expect for it to always work out like that, either — and I’m trying to keep my expectations in mind for tomorrow’s big day as well. In my family, Christmas Eve is meant to be chaotic, rowdy, and delicious. I’m only hoping that tomorrow is as merry and bright as it can possibly be.
If it doesn’t go too smoothly, we can all blame it on the late Thanksgiving.
Yours Cumulatively, That American Girl
That American Girl 
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