As Thanksgiving draws nigh, and everyone takes a moment to honor the Pilgrims by pillaging their local supermarkets and polishing their cutlery, it’s a good time to shed a little light on a lesser-known holiday tradition: The Orphan Party.
I can hear your collective “Awwww” from my desk chair, but don’t look so dismayed; we Orphans aren’t all Oliver Twist types with sad eyes, sunken cheeks and empty gruel bowls. Unlike just about every holiday movie you’ve ever seen–the ones where inconveniently located family members brave storms, villains, awful luck and smarmy ticket-takers in overcrowded airport terminals just to get to their loved ones before the carving knife is brandished–there are many of us who don’t go in for the desperate, groin-tightening need to join our kin for the annual rites around the sacrificial turkey. As a perennial Thanksgiving Orphan, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked if I would be with my family on Thanksgiving, and then nearly forcefully adopted when I replied with the casual, “Nah.”
Contrary to popular belief, we Orphans aren’t necessarily stranded with no place to go, nor do we usually hate our families. We certainly don’t hate food. To be sure, we love the turkey and that bready concoction with which we’ve replaced its innards. We love the jellied cranberries, the marshmallowed yams, the mashed potatoes and gravy and the ubiquitous green bean casserole. We love the Hawaiian dinner rolls, the glorified rice, the fruit salad, and the pumpkin pie. And you’d better believe we love the wine. We may even feel moderately comfortable with cloth napkins.
You’ll find nary an Orphan who objects to Thanksgiving on a gastronomical level. After all, it’s like an all-access pass to an exotic wonderland of rare foodstuffs. When was the last time you spent twenty-four hours baking a bird, or ate a yam? For the rest of the year, we only find turkey between slices of bread, we sometimes find yams disguised as french fries, and marshmallows are reserved for cocoa, s’mores and breakfast cereals. Green bean casseroles are strictly for church potlucks and funerals. Cranberries are only found in scones, vodka cocktails or in juice consumed to treat urinary tract infections. The only stuffing we cram down our pie-holes comes in the cheesy crust of late night pizza delivery. Thanksgiving provides an opportunity to assemble a motley crew of edibles and tacit permission to eat with reckless abandon. What’s not to love about that?
So, why do I and others like me remain Orphans on Thanksgiving? It’s true that some are disenfranchised. Some are misanthropes. Some are tofu-eating disestablishmentarians raising fresh objections to some of the really objectionable behavior of our celebrated Pilgrims, revised clean out of our oral traditions. But for many of us, it’s simple: we just don’t like the stress.
Let’s face it, the meal planning and grocery shopping is damned stressful. The food preparation is stressful; having so many dishes not only turn out, but also land on the table fresh and hot at the same time is mind-boggling to me. The logistics around seating (including the kid table), serving, clearing and cleaning practically requires a Master’s degree. The guest list of immediate family members, extended family members and the token would-be Orphan should be left to the talents of wedding planners.
There’s also the stress that comes along with just being a human being in that environment. There’s pressure on the cook(s) to prepare food that everyone will enjoy, and there’s an equal and opposite pressure on everyone else to actually enjoy it and enthusiastically comment about said enjoyment with just the right note of sentiment and sincerity. There’s the awkward kitchen dance where those not in charge of the food try to strike a balance between ceremoniously offering to help and staying out of the way. There’s the endlessly recurring question, “What time do we eat?”, while trying to determine if you can subsist on mixed nuts until that time, or if you should risk being caught eating a sandwich.
And, of course, you have to figure out the perfect thing to be thankful for during the meal’s opening ceremony, because you just know that the first person to speak will lay claim to the prized “I’m thankful for family and friends,” and you can’t be caught proclaiming that you’re thankful for Xbox, Pringles and beer. You’ve got to find a new baby or a cancer remission to be thankful for at the very least.
For the rest of the meal, everyone makes a concerted effort to avoid potentially awkward conversational topics–which are like landmines scattered across the unmapped territory of a diverse group of guests–while also elevating the substance and style of elocution to be worthy of such a remarkable occasion, turning each participant into a clumsy Walt Whitman or, more likely, a deaf-mute paying special attention to the Jackson Pollack masterpiece forming on his/her plate.
Then, for the cook(s) there’s the postpartum depression that occurs directly after mealtime when they realize that they’ve spent two days cooking a meal that was consumed in half an hour, and that the scrapheap of dirty dishes and cookware beckons to be dealt with while everyone else settles into sofas and Barcaloungers for L-tryptophan-induced comas.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Thanksgiving is a bad thing. It can actually be a wonderful day, and I learned that as an Orphan.
When I was 21, my BFF Tarah, her girlfriend Diane and I struck out on our own and moved into a dilapidated, low-rent apartment building on Capitol Hill. Being new to this adult independence, we informed our families that we wouldn’t be going home for Thanksgiving, and instead spent the day barhopping with all the other holiday ex-pats. (We did the same for Christmas.) While we presumably had a good time, we decided the next year to have a more traditional Thanksgiving for just the three of us.
Diane was decidedly the best cook of the bunch (she taught me how to make boxed mac ‘n’ cheese without the directions), and she volunteered to be the matriarch of the kitchen–her first Thanksgiving meal flying solo. Tarah and I emptied our anemic bank accounts acquiring everything on her list of ingredients (including a turkey and jellied cranberries), plus mixed nuts and a half-rack of beer. We cranked up the stereo, read newspapers and debated philosophy while Diane cooked up a class-four storm in the ramshackle kitchen, occasionally joining us on our one couch for a beer when she could afford to take a break. We all hit one of our neighborhood bars in the afternoon, and when Diane had to head back to continue cooking, Tarah and I decided to take a four-hour walk. We explored Volunteer Park, we talked without pause, we got lost somewhere in the Montlake neighborhood, we stopped in at random taverns, we devised hypothetical strategies for scaling the side of an old brick water tower, and we kept walking and talking.
We finally arrived back at our apartment in time to set the table, arranging our odd collection of hand-me-down dishes, utensils and paper towels on the duct-taped card table in the dining area. We lit a couple of taper candles propped up in a mason jar on a salad plate. We served ourselves from the kitchen counter and we sat down to eat. We talked, we ate an assortment of food made with varying degrees of success, we drank beer in bottles, and we talked some more. We got into a gloriously heated debate about Ayn Rand, and then one about Immanuel Kant. We were in no hurry, we had no compunction about deviating from the holiday template. And though we were a garrulous bunch, we let it go unsaid that we were truly thankful for each other. We already knew that.
In short, it was the best Thanksgiving we’d ever had.
What I’ve come to recognize over the years is that that particular Thanksgiving was “successful,” because it actually embodied what everyone says is important but fumbles in the execution. We were with people we loved (and with whom we actually enjoyed spending time). We were thankful for things big and small. We were sentimental without the need for grandiosity. We were relaxed and unpressured by tradition and social norms. We were more like the Pilgrims than most, though socially conscious and enlightened.
It’s been a lot of years since then, but I’ve taken with me the idea of what made that day great, and these identifying characteristics can often be found at any Thanksgiving Orphan Party. Now, an Orphan Party is usually populated by a mixture of people that either can’t get home to their families on Thanksgiving or just don’t want to. But since the archetype of the holiday has already been averted, the level of camaraderie and plain ol’ geniality gets naturally dialed up to an eleven.
Everyone brings something to the table (literally and figuratively), eliminating the pressure from a single cook delivering on the Thanksgiving promise, and also dismissing the tragedy of a dish gone wrong. If something turns out lousy, everyone can laugh and commiserate about it. Pairing the perfect wine with dinner? Impossible, but who cares, because there are probably a dozen bottles between the guests. Dishes? No sweat. Most of them are taken home again.
And because there are no quirky family-specific traditions to follow during the meal (and no weird uncles), everyone is free to chat about whatever they have in common, to eat a bunch of food, and get satisfactorily inebriated without disappointing the more conservative members of typical families. People are polite, of course, (“Hey, I really like your rug” or “This is delicious; where’d you get the recipe?”), but not because they feel like they’ll be struck down by a lightning bolt for straying from formality. It’s just good manners.
A few years ago, my buddy Casey and I decided to attend an Orphan Party on Thanksgiving at one of our favorite seedy taverns. I can’t begin to imagine how many health code violations were present, but they were ignored in the spirit of the holiday, and as far as I know, no one left with food poisoning. The pool table was covered by a full sheet of plywood, and patrons of the bar each arrived with a dish to share (Casey cooked both of ours, paying my price of admission). Traditional fare littered the table with a lot of repeats and some individuals’ specialties. Each bowl of stuffing had a unique color and texture, but it was all recognizable. Each bowl of cranberry sauce appealed to a unique cross-section of the bar’s population. Each pumpkin pie…was a pumpkin pie. Attendees circulated around the pool table loading up paper plates, and returning to their booths or bar stools. Casey watched to see people’s reactions to his Pinot Noir cranberry sauce, but in all reality, no one really gave a damn. It wasn’t a competition, there were no rules, and the guests (hailing from all walks of life) were just having a grand time celebrating Thanksgiving with friends and strangers alike. Sitting at the bar with a pitcher of beer and a plate full of potluck, laughing and back-slapping with the stranger on the next stool, now that’s the Pilgrim spirit.
I suppose that if someday I have a wife and a litter of children of my own, I’ll naturally want to begin celebrating Thanksgiving at my own table with my own tribe (and maybe a token Orphan), and it’ll be easy for me to draw upon the traditions and formalities with which I was raised (e.g. “Let’s go around the table and say what we’re thankful for,” or “I know no one eats shredded carrot salad, but it’s Thanksgiving…”). However, I hope to bring the lessons of Orphanhood with me–cooperation, disregard for perfection, sincere gratitude and plenty of casual quality time with my loved ones filled with easy conversation and lots of chuckles. I will undoubtedly kick off the dinner with a speech about how I’m thankful for family and friends, but if you’re a guest, and you’re thankful for Xbox and beer, awesome. You’d just better bring booze.
