I like mashed potatoes, but I like them with butter and Parmesan cheese, so I don’t like them with a meat meal. I like sweet potatoes, so if I go somewhere for Thanksgiving, I usually end up with bread, salad, and sweet potatoes, unless it’s some goyisher place where there’s marshmallow on the sweet potatoes. My mother always baked them in the oven, and served them cut in half with a little margarine.
I’ve been a vegetarian almost my whole adult life, but even when I did eat meat, I didn’t like turkey. Oddly, I LOVE tofurky. I am much happier with the vegetarian meals we make than with anything I’ve ever been served anywhere.
I also hate pumpkin pie. My mother didn’t usually indulge special tastes, but she did make more than one kind of pie on Thanksgiving.
I’m not sure why, but Thanksgiving was at our house a lot. My aunt on my father’s side got Passover, my grandmothers got Hanukkah-- one would get the first day, and one would get the last day, and Purim was usually at my other aunt’s-- my mother’s sister-- we’d go to a party at the synagogue, and then to a small dinner at her place, and the adults would get drunk. That aunt didn’t have to do as much cooking, but she had to put out lots of cots and sleeping bags, and then we’d all go some place for breakfast in the morning, and we kids would get to school late.
Yom Kippur break-the-fast would be at my aunt’s parents, but she would invite everyone. She’d lost all her extended family in the Holocaust, and so had her husband, so she was always happy to bring her children’s in-laws and their families into her home, and recreate the big gatherings of her childhood that she couldn’t give her children, but she wanted to give her grandchildren. I called her Bobbe, and her husband Zayde. I called my father’s parents Saba and Safta. I called my mother’s parents Grandma and Grandpa. They were the ones really into assimilating.
Every time my mother would bitch about getting stuck with Thanksgiving, my father would remind her that there were no halakha (Jewish rules) about how to celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s kosher, you say one blessing, then dive in.
