Your Cranberry Sauce Sucks: Or, Thanksgiving Ritual and Redemption

Is there a holiday that inspires quite the same strong feelings as Thanksgiving? Granted, Christmas has those angry right-wing pundits spewing about the demon atheists and their violent and aggressive use of the word ‘holiday,’ and St. Patrick’s Day has a lot of really sad and annoying people whose last ancestor left Ireland 200 years ago singing in abysmal fake accents about their home and non-native land. But Thanksgiving has something far more important: food.

In fact, food is so important to Thanksgiving that people become very protective of their favourite dishes. Organizing a Thanksgiving dinner can be maddening -- we’ve all seen that episode of Friends where Monica ends up making 700 kinds of potatoes, appealing to all expectations. Thanksgiving expectations are ritualized in our youth, and we feel attached to them because it’s so rare to have an entire day devoted to comfort food. In my case, I adopted what is undoubtedly the single best Thanksgiving tradition going: I wrap my turkey in bacon. (We’re British, we can’t help wrapping things in fat.) And another Thanksgiving tic I inherited is even more important to me: a pumpkin-free holiday. These two things being mildly confusing to the average host, I throw Thanksgiving dinners so that I can do it my way.

One of the things I have noticed since I began to collect homeless students at Thanksgiving is the fierceness with which people protect their holiday traditions.

“Are you roasting those potatoes?” they ask.

“Yes,” I respond.

“So. Not mashed then.”

“Nope.”

“Uh-huh. And, um. No sweet potatoes? My mom does them with marshmallows.”

“Yeah, that’s disgusting. Get out of my house.”

But it’s crucial that we protect our Thanksgiving rituals, because in many ways, they define us. I will never be the kind of person who sprinkles marshmallows on yams. That’s simply not me. My hero when it comes to the preservation of holiday tradition is Adam Carolla. Yep, THAT Adam Carolla, the one who writes for puppets making prank calls. But for a decade or so he was also the co-host of Loveline, and year after year he would extol the virtues of real cranberry sauce, so much so that he would annually preach the gospel of “one sack of cranberries, one cup of sugar, one cup of water” to thirteen-year-olds calling a syndicated radio show to find out why they smell down there. Do not, he reminds us, “reach for the can opener like a dog.” To eat cranberry sauce from a can is, according to Carolla, akin to drinking Mountain Dew or eating sheet cake or Chef Boyardee after the age of nine. Carolla is a little disordered, it’s true, but we all draw these little boundaries around ourselves, and food seems to be the thing we are most willing to fight over. Thanksgiving gives us the opportunity to do it on a large scale. With gravy.

So be passionate about your food this Thanksgiving, and fight for your right to have mashed potatoes with garlic, or asparagus instead of brussel sprouts, or a pumpkinless holiday season. It’s that passion for what we know is right that fuels all the good things in this world. Thanksgiving, of course, is chief among those good things.

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