I’ve been thinking a lot lately (as I’m sure many of you have) about how to maintain the nostalgic feeling of the holiday season when things look so completely foreign this year. Thanksgiving, for me, usually meant: waking up just in time to catch the tail-end of the Macy’s parade; kitchen smells indicating my mom’s actually-early call time; and if we weren’t inviting over 20+ guests (my mom has five sisters), traveling to see them all.
While the gatherings have shrunk in size over the years (inevitable moving, and passing, of family members), this year has whittled away at our core group even further. There’s a silver lining there, though: fewer people to host means more time to focus on the little details that get overlooked in favor of convenience and utility. Instead of huge, single-use trays heating over sterno, we can serve sides in carefully selected vessels, and in lieu of bringing out the folding chairs for extra seating, we can use the dining table as it was designed.