Feast of favorites

And other joys for your Sunday

In 2020, I canceled Thanksgiving.

I don’t love Thanksgiving. At it’s root, Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday that glosses over genocide. In practice, it’s a long weekend that you spend eating with people you struggle to understand.

And in 2020, as a single parent with no family nearby, it was just the three of us. And I’d be damned if I made a turkey for me and two kids who hate turkey. I remember a lot of talk then about how the shutdown and the isolation of that year meant so many of us would remake our old traditions — we’d find new meaning in them and toss out the things that didn’t make sense.

So, I shut down Thanksgiving. In its place, we picked a weekend in November and celebrated the Feast of Favorites, which is a thing I made up.

Essentially, at the Feast of Favorites, we all pick one or two of our favorite foods and then we feast. The first year my daughter picked pink fluffy Jell-o salad, I picked macaroni and cheese, and my son picked a bowl of croutons.

This year, my sister and brother-in-law came to join us. And the third annual Feast of Favorites was the most chaotic joyful meal yet.

By which I mean, completely deranged.