Maybe it’s being in my thirties, maybe it’s living on my own, but the novelty of adulthood has mostly worn off. Most days feel like endless strings of work and chores and tasks and obligations, consistently buying groceries instead of always ordering Sweetgreen and paying all my bills on my own and wondering when I became a person who cleans baseboards. I realize, of course, that I am setting myself up for the inevitable eye rolls, the annoyed welcomes to reality—questions of what took me so long or complaints about “my generation” and its perpetual state of arrested development. And, you know what, sure. Go for it. It is deserved, but also it’s not, but I won’t get into that here!
The thing is, adulthood looks both exactly and not at all like I imagined it would when I was a kid. There’s only so much I can do about the big things: I have to resign myself, for example, to the fact that I will never be Jenna Rink, Big Time Magazine Editor (with an insane closet in an even more insane Fifth Avenue co-op) no matter how much I hustle and girlboss; the publishing economy and media landscape have fundamentally changed! (But also because, while I respect the dreams of 12-27 year old me, that occupation is a hard pass from me now.) But the little things, those small delights, are what keep me from throwing myself out my window when I look around and think “this can’t be forever, can it????” When I’m feeling beaten down by the mundanity of it all, the day to day maintenance it takes just to resemble a human person, and the unending performance of responsibility, playing the part of a girl who tries to be the healthiest version of herself possible—a girl who cannot settle for simply closing all the rings on her Apple Watch but must exceed them—even when other things are more fun or at least more easy, I remember…I’m free. No one is forcing me to get an A in adulthood! No one is telling me I have to be the best adult there ever was, or that I have to be in bed at a reasonable hour, or have protein with every meal. It is in these fleeting moments that I think: I am an adult. I am in charge now. I am allowed to do away—even if only briefly—with arbitrary rules, be frivolous, and have fun. And that means I can have a Shirley Temple whenever I want, with as many cherries as I please, and no one can tell me no.
The Shirley Temple Rule reminds me that years ago, when she was just a kid herself, my little sister would joke that when she finally became a grown up, she would have Thanksgiving at her house, and it would be a glorious, chaotic feast free from the confines of what we’re told Thanksgiving is supposed to be. Pierogi and pizza, nachos and Chinese takeout and pumpkin pie—they’d all find their way onto her menu for the day. She meant it more as a rebellion against rules and structure, more an embracement of her future self’s free will to never again have to eat “good” food she didn’t like and instead choose a hodgepodge of the “junk” food she did. But every year that passes, and the more distance grows between myself and any traditional celebration of the holiday I have ever had, I think about her idea more and more, and I’d like to make a recommendation: Have you considered having a lovely, large cheese pizza for Thanksgiving?
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I’d always wanted to have the kind of Thanksgiving I saw in movies, the kind where it’s more a party and less a staid sit-down affair. I wanted everyone I loved to be in the same place, family and old friends who have become family I inherited alike, mingling and passing hors d'oeuvres and complimenting the wine, cheerful commotion coming from the kitchen, but just minor chirping; you couldn’t imagine anyone getting stressed over a meal, much less to the point of theatrics and shouting. The dinner table would be filled with so many cross avenues of dialogue, all smart and kind and witty banter with minimal bicker, and the door would open to anyone who wants to come over later for pie and singing around the piano. I wanted to be in the warmest room imaginable, feeling not overwhelmed by love like I sometimes do now, but at ease within it, like it was the most normal thing in the world. I wanted, in short, a Hannah and Her Sisters Thanksgiving.
But, of course, part of adulthood is realizing that the real world version of it rarely resembles the movie version. In my thirteen Thanksgivings as a New Yorker—seven of which have now been spent in the city on my own—I have yet to have any version of the holiday that looks the way I envisioned it. That isn’t to say it hasn’t, at times, resembled other movies. The Thanksgiving in Mistress America, Noah Baumbach’s underrated 2015 screwball—gratuitous aside here: why doesn’t anyone make screwballs anymore!?!? more screwballs please!!!—is different from the Thanksgiving of Hannah and Her Sisters entirely. The built-up event of it all—the wedding of naive Barnard freshman Tracy’s mother and 30-something flibbertigibbet Brooke’s father—has been canceled. “No thanks,” Brooke tells her father over the phone when he suggests that she can still come home for the day. “I’ll probably just end up doing something depressing but young.” It’s the perfect way to describe the small little reunion and farewell meal shared between the two would-be sisters who only just met that week and already went through the motions of sisterhood—from infatuation and idolization to betrayal and petty anger, hurt, and reconciliation—together. It’s a pitch perfect portrait of what it’s like to exist in the city as a single, unattached woman-child on a major national holiday: Two girls, in their least nice clothes, at a corner table at Veseleka. Not orphans, but on their own, a makeshift little family over a makeshift little meal, a movie view of adulthood that is realistic in dispelling the romanticism of it. If Thanksgiving in the movies is about abundance, about having so much love you take it for granted, Mistress America is about what it’s like to have a little, but fiercely appreciate every drop of it.
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Two of my favorite Thanksgivings in recent memory are Mistress America Thanksgivings. One was spent in my apartment with boxes of Whole Foods hot bar, one pumpkin pie, and four bottles of wine my friend Candace and I split between ourselves. I have very little recollection of the day (we didn’t drink all that wine, obviously, but we must have come close) aside from spending much of it watching a series of films with men who are old enough to be our fathers now but were incredibly handsome in the ‘90s and debating their hottest eras. It was maybe depressing to some, and certainly young, but it was gloriously perfect to me. In one sloppy Thursday dinner with one single friend, I went from feeling depressed about what I didn’t have, how I wasn’t celebrating the holiday, and how I wasn’t doing adulthood right, to grateful for what I did. Thanksgiving is about gratitude—well, really, it’s about violent, genocidal white colonization that elementary history books tried to tell us was a peaceful, friendly concession of native lands but I won’t Christina Ricci-in-The-Ice-Storm the point home here—but it’s a gratitude often arrived at through overconsumption and rabid consumerism. Sometimes, I think, it’s enough to be grateful for a single friend, a single sofa, and a single day-long movie marathon of hot men.
In 2020, I spent Thanksgiving alone in that same apartment. My roommate had flown home in spite of the risk, where she would stay through Christmas. I Zoomed with my family, and texted my other friends who were stranded and scattered throughout the city about how insane it felt to have physical freedom from forced familial rituals yet still find ourselves unable to escape sending feverish texts about them to each other. “Oh my GOD,” I wrote in one text, “do you honestly ever just think ‘how am I related to these people?????’” In November of 2020, I should have felt grateful that they were still alive. I should have felt grateful that I was alive. I should have felt grateful that we were all healthy, and managing to stay mostly sane in spite of everything. I should have felt grateful for Zoom, grateful for a phone, grateful for the luxury we all had of being able to spend the holiday in the comfort and safety of our own homes. I was, don’t get me wrong, but that day, I also felt very grateful—delightedly, overwhelmingly, perhaps even a bit disproportionately grateful—for a lovely cheese pizza and an ice cold bottle of Moet, just for me.
The “I’m cooking through the trauma!” phase of the pandemic was long gone. Nothing about the holiday was traditional that year; in the week leading up to it, I started to think about what it would be like to say fuck it entirely, to lean in to the regression and escapism of a child’s fantasy of adulthood that the stilted, infinite present, uneasy time was forcing upon me. I was never going to cook a turkey (or even a chicken!) myself. If I would be ordering takeout anyway, who said I had to order a Thanksgiving meal? I decided to get a pizza. What you have to understand is that pizza is kind of an indulgence to me, a food that I keep at arms length in a disciplined and for special circumstances only setting, part the desire to “be healthy” and part the desire to never eat something so often I lose the sensation of taking a bite and remarking “this is the single greatest thing I have ever eaten in my life.” Having a large cheese pizza and a bottle of champagne to myself felt just as decadent as a full Thanksgiving spread, even if it didn’t look at all like what was conventional, even if it felt a little dangerous and a little unallowed. And as I consumed it while watching the so-terrible-it-was-incredible, inexplicably horny Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn family Christmas movie on Netflix, I thought, “This is so wonderful.” I thought, “I am so grateful.”
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Here’s the thing: You don’t have to do Thanksgiving the way it’s done in the movies to have a nice time. You don’t have to eat turkey or potatoes or stuffing to be grateful. You don’t even have to eat vegetables if you don’t want to. (I do, not just because I genuinely really like them but because I have internalized just the right amount of shame about being a responsible adult that I would literally break down if I went one day without eating anything green.) If Thanksgiving is supposed to be about being grateful for what you have, if it’s supposed to be about abundance, celebrating a bounty, whatever, why not do it the way you want? You’re an adult. You’re allowed! We’ve got, like, five years left in this bitch before earth burns to a crisp, so who cares! Reject tradition, embrace chaos. I would suggest expressing your gratitude over a large cheese pizza, but a large cheese pizza can be anything you want. I’m not going to tell you what to do.
Obviously, I still want a Hannah and Her Sisters Thanksgiving, but it’s not my be-all, end-all anymore. Mostly, I hope my sister does have that pierogi, pizza, nacho, Chinese, and pumpkin pie extravaganza one day. She’s allowed to, and no one can tell her no. I just hope I’ll be invited.
misc. addendums:
i love thanksgiving in the movies and i wish it happened more!!! enough bad christmas movies! give us thanksgiving movies! some others i like a lot that i did not mention above but recommend: The Last Waltz (1978) (obviously); Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987) (duh); Home for the Holidays (1995); You’ve Got Mail (1997) (it’s a movie for ALL seasons); The Daytrippers (1997); Pieces of April (2003); What She Said (2021); not a movie per se but the season 3 episode of Gilmore Girls where Lorelai and Rory have to eat four dinners in one day. once again saying: more thanksgiving representation in media please!!!
this isn’t entirely related to thanksgiving, but it’s not not: i am currently reading barbra streisand’s riveting and utterly delightful memoir (okay, listening to, as i have been informed that audiobook is the way to go on this one and it’s true! i cannot recommend it enough!!). aside from triggering “i should have been a girly in the 50s and 60s” delusional brainworm-infested thoughts from me yet again, it constantly makes me very hungry, which brings me to my point: should the next bed crumbs just be a ranking of every food mentioned in my name is barbra???
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okay that's it that's the end thanks sorry love u bye