Overwhelming. That word keeps breaking through the surface of my mind from mid-November until January. I make lists. I make lists of lists. For all my adult life, I’ve associated Thanksgiving with convivial fun and with exhaustion. Oh, yes, I love setting the big table and the adjacent tables with vintage monogrammed napkins, just-polished silver, writing the place cards, arranging the flowers, and even cooking for three days prior. I love my aunt Mary’s corn bread stuffing, my mother’s brown sugar muffins and cream gravy.
The actual dinner? It falls short of my expectations. Something’s cold. I get stuck with a guest’s guest who recounts endless medical appointments—the organ recital—and childhood anecdotes. The feast is over way too soon, leaving counters strewn with wineglasses and sad side dishes no one touched. All that work—and we’re done?
Pulling out spiraling yards of foil, I give away all the leftovers. What remains of the twenty-five-pound turkey dries out quickly. If only I’d be allowed to prepare just the breast in the Italian way, opened and stuffed with pistachios, breadcrumbs, and veal, then tied, rolled, and roasted. That is not the way we do it at Thanksgiving. As ordained in the stars, the big bird is whole and basted and stuffed, and my husband will again review the carving video on his computer and perform handsomely at the table.
Before my daughter’s childhood cutouts of turkeys and pilgrims are put away, before the tablecloths are ironed and stored, the next holiday rolls forward like a sneaker wave. Deck the halls! Every year, we all swear we will give one gift to each person—forget drawing names for only one gift, we’re not that delusional. But we will simplify; we will not participate in the orgy of shopping, ordering, wrapping, delivering, consuming. We will make this holiday about food and friendship and warm evenings around the fire. We do that, yes, we do. We have lovely dinners for friends, we make our own wreaths. (Is that really worth it?) We bake and pack cheese straws, roasted pecans, and my mother’s Martha Washington jetties in darling little boxes and distribute them among friends. But we succumb to amnesia and enter the fray like maniacs, fretting about what X would really like and is what we have for Y enough and what on earth can you give to Z, who has everything and then some? Suddenly, the tree is surrounded, knee-deep in gifts. I have the embarrassing memory of myself at nine or ten opening dozens of presents and at the end looking up innocently and asking, “Is that all?”
What to do? Give to charities, yes. Find a school with a program that makes sure children have pajamas, yes. Contribute to book programs. Adopt a star on the church’s tree, ensuring holiday dinners for the community’s needy. All that. Still, the holidays incite madness.
Why this end-of-year craze, when “…winter nights enlarge / The number of their houres,” as Thomas Campion wrote. I say there’s something primordial at work.
Aside from the table laden with favorite morsels, and beneath the ribbons and wrapping paper and tissue and tape, something else mysterious is transpiring. Emotions turn fragile. Something in the rudimentary medulla recognizes the magnetic pull toward the darkest, longest night: the solstice, when the ancients thought the sun, in battle with darkness, might die, and therefore the earth, too. Solstice: sun standing still. If it went lower in the sky, it would disappear. Could it happen? Empirically, we think not, if we think about it at all, but instinct turning in the bone marrow sends forth doubt. In the oldest spirals of our DNA, we feel a vulnerability. We are here for a brief ride on this planet from which we soon will be flung again into the unknown we emerged from. Therefore, no matter what religion or pagan tradition your own solstice holidays might represent, what we most want to give our loved ones, we cannot. Giver and receiver know this without knowing it.
Hence the eternal is that all? Hence, the eternal I’m not sure she really likes it. Hence the private weeping in the bathroom and even the bourbon-fueled cousins fighting in the kitchen. The tears that well up in the department store when “O, Holy Night” loops around again.
The jolly end-of-the-year holidays are profound. On the shortest day, Earth swings toward light, and at that crux we feel the pith of life, the truth brought close. You throw out a silent message to the universe: Let us be. Let me have my home. The life I am living.
The crisis passes. A little more light accrues each day. Wasn’t it a lovely holiday after all? The white cat cavorts along the river path. Red camellias press against the frosted window glass. The soufflé hits the top of the oven; the boy loved the books. “Read to me,” he says. Yes, I will. The biking windbreaker—exactly what the no-longer-rabid cousin dreamed of. He smiles. “Perfect for spring.” “Amazing,” my daughter exclaims as she pages through her new Israeli cookbook. “Let’s go vegetarian.” Everyone’s cool.
“I’m glad it’s over,” my neighbor admits.
“Let’s get that tree down before New Year’s,” my husband suggests.
I look up from my notebook where I’m listing projects, spring seeds to order, recipes. “Down so soon?” I say. “Not yet. Didn’t I tell you? We’re having fifty over on New Year’s Day.”
Martha Washington Jetties
Did Martha really make these delectable, chocolate-dipped, nutty fondant candies? I’ve prepared them every Christmas of my life, as did my mother, and now my daughter. Mother performed the chocolate bath on our cold back porch so the dip would set immediately. Fun to make, jetties will elicit major joy from those lucky enough to be given this gift. One seems like enough, since they are so rich; yet by the end of the day, the tray sits empty.
• First make fondant balls, about four dozen:
½ cup softened unsalted butter
4 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pound confectioner’s sugar, sifted
1 cup chopped pecans
• Mix well the first three ingredients, then slowly work in the powdered sugar. Add pecans last. Roll the fondant into bite-size balls.
• Place them on two baking sheets lined with waxed paper.
• Chill well in the fridge.
Chocolate dip
8 ounces semisweet, good-quality chocolate
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
5–6 drops vanilla extract
3 tablespoons cream
• Melt together the chocolate and butter on very low heat in a small saucepan. Add vanilla and cream.
• Raise to simmer, then remove the pan to where you will work.
• Using toothpicks, quickly dip and swirl each ball in the chocolate, coating the fondant all around. Place onto the waxed paper. If the chocolate starts to harden in the pan, briefly return it to the heat.
• When you’ve dipped all the balls, cover the little toothpick holes with chocolate to seal them.
• Chill again until well set. Peel the candies off the paper and place in gift tins. Keep in a cool place.