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Communications Manager Sam Milligan reflects on Thanksgiving traditions, Shabbat dinners, and asking the question “Why don’t I do this more often?” as part of building a personal community.
My little brother, great-grandfather, and I at our childhood home. Thanksgiving 2005.
Tomorrow is, hands down, my favorite holiday of the year. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. When I was little, growing up in South Jersey, we’d always host, with my aunts and uncles, paternal grandparents, and a pair of great-grandparents all parking on the street outside my Cherry Hill home. With Thanksgiving marking the first day where Christmas music was seasonally acceptable, we’d play Frank Sinatra’s Ultimate Christmas and Stevie Wonder’s Someday at Christmas.
My great-grandfather and I would sit on the wooden stairs near the front door. He’d tell me stories about growing up in New Jersey in the 1920s: mail-order baseball bats, his champion high school football team, class trips to the shore with the same 2nd grade teacher who’d eventually teach my grandmother. I’d take new arrivals’ coats and lay them on my parents’ bed. My great-grandmother would bring cranberry sauce, the bitter kind made of fresh cranberries, which I’d sequester on one side of my plate and avoid, pining for the real cranberry sauce, the kind that retains the shape of the can you wiggle it out of. My grandmother would bring “sweet potato yum-yum,” a sort of sweet potato mash topped with brown sugar.
Mom begins the carving.
My mother – beginning days earlier with slices of white bread shingling our kitchen counter to quickly dry out and go the exact right amount of stale, while another part of the yellow formica counter was dusted with flour to prepare balls of potato bread dough, stuffed three at a time into muffin pans and baked into tricorner pull-apart rolls – handled the rest of the cooking. She churned out ambrosia salad, mashed potatoes, rolls, stuffing, an oven-baked turkey, and more. Our teetotaling family would drink cranberry juice with seltzer, and I’d perch at the blue card table we kept tucked behind the hot water heater in the crawlspace, unearthed and designated as the Kids Table, and wonder: Why don’t we do this more often?
When the gatherings thinned, with family moving or passing away, my parents, brother, and I often spent Thanksgiving outside New Jersey, packing up my father’s 2004 Ford Explorer and spending a long weekend in upstate New York or in a rented cabin in the Shenandoah valley. The routine changed a little. It was quieter with just the four of us. We started deep frying the Thanksgiving turkey, often safely. We hiked, played contentious games of Risk, and watched the X-Files (I encountered “Squeeze” and Eugene Tooms about four years before I probably should have).
You might be asking: So what? It’s a fair question. Over the past couple years, both in working at Gather and getting close with my Jewish friends in DC, I’ve really grown to love hearing about people’s Shabbat practices and the why behind those gatherings. Above is my love letter to Thanksgiving – but you could take every feeling, tweak the details, and apply it all to the lovely Friday night dinners I’ve had the honor of attending. Building a life in DC, building a life a few hours removed from any family, building a life for which growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey didn’t necessarily offer a ton of precedent, in the moments I stumble into fulfillment, I’ve found myself asking that same question I always had at Thanksgiving: Why don’t I do this more often?
When I’m interviewing someone for a JPOW feature, or talking with friends, I find that so much of what lights people up in their own Jewish practice is the “often.” It’s the socioemotional and spiritual metronome that a weekly meal like Shabbat dinner provides. I texted some friends as I wrote this piece, asking them what called them to recognize Shabbat in some way every week.
They cited Shabbat as a place of connection with seasonal cycles, with sunrise and sunset. It is a chance to put your own take on a tradition, while maintaining a unique bond with past and future generations and Jewish communities all around the world. It is “a big meal, with many friends” or a time to connect with family, regardless of where everyone is physically located. At once a week, it is regular enough to build a meaningful routine – one friend talked about his winter Shabbat practice of what he and his wife call “Couch Soup Time” – but not so frequent that it becomes mundane.
The author and his little brother at their childhood home in New Jersey.
I have, somewhat slowly, realized that the things that have always drawn me to Thanksgiving – a lot of them, anyway – are not tied to Thanksgiving itself. Rather, they’re baked (ha-ha) into the practice that I and my family attached to recognizing the day. The gathering, the purposeful and tightly-planned menu, the music. The tradition! It’s a bit of a “yeah, duh” realization, but when I sit down with a friend at their Shabbat dinner, or host friends in my own home, so much of what I’ve always loved about Thanksgiving is at the table with us there, too.
Of course, those special moments have to be earned. A personally or communally significant Shabbat practice requires action and intention and purpose. The stuffing would not be as delicious if my mother only remembered she’d be making it halfway through the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A little while back, I was complaining to a writer acquaintance of mine that I couldn’t find the writing group I wanted in DC. I wanted us to meet on Sunday mornings. I wanted it to be small, where everyone knew each other pretty well, and we could workshop writing but also share recommendations, gossip, brainstorm. “Okay,” this person told me. “You know what you’re looking for. Why don’t you just do it?”
As I sit down tomorrow, I’ll be chewing on those two questions. First: Why don’t I do this more often? Second: Why don’t you just do it? We’re gathering in Maryland with my girlfriend’s family, and I’ve volunteered to bring dessert: pecan pie, using the recipe my mother recommends, the one printed next to the nutritional information on bottles of Karo corn syrup, a dark sludge poured lovingly into Crisco-based pie crust, a recipe from my mother’s mother. I’ll put the Sinatra album on for our drive home. And, I’m finding the other moments in the year to open my apartment – a Wednesday dinner with our down-the-hall neighbors, a potluck with my pickup basketball buddies. I’m doing my best to skip the ‘Why don’t I do this more often?’ in favor of a better question: When are we doing this again?
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