Best or worst: Host or Guest?

The basic truths of Thanksgiving.

I don’t know what’s better: hosting Thanksgiving, or being a guest. And I don’t know which is worst, either. Each has its perils and pleasures.

Hosting: it’s so draining, so exhausting. I mean, watching your wife work so hard, it just takes it right out of you. Kidding: I help as best as I can, but it’s with the non-food jobs. My Thanksgiving culinary skills are limited to spanking the cranberry cylinder out of its can. I do the Cleaning. I make sure the wine glasses out, and the right ones - can’t have people drinking red out of white glasses, or the world as we know it would come to an end. I get the water pitcher down from the top shelf. No, not that one, the good one. The other good one.  I vacuum and dust, in case guests want to push the piano away from the wall and check out our housekeeping.

In short, it’s necessary busywork. I’s nothing compared to what she does, making the meal in a perfectly-timed opus that rivals a Mahler symphony for its length and complexity.  It brings back the Thanksgivings of my childhood, when my Mom fretted over the turkey, waiting, waiting, waiting for the little red thermometer rod to pop up and prove the bird was done. Every year she peered at the big basting Butterball through the porthole of the electric GE wall-insert oven, like a submarine commander staring through the periscope. Every year: it’s broken! It has to be broken!

Then it would pop up, and there would be great rejoicing, for the bird was nigh. We would tuck in to flour-dusted dollar buns. Potatoes whipped as thin and fluffy as gossamer clouds. Sweet Potatoes, of course, rivaled for sugar-content only by the Mogen David wine. (It’s what Grandpa liked. It was like drinking a Mantovani arrangement.) The bird was always perfect, even though it may have been as dry as a paperback book. A non-fiction paperback book. You never failed to praise it, because it would be ungrateful not to be happy - and besides, that’s what gravy’s for. Gravy can perform CPR on a dry slice quite nicely.

No disasters come to mind, alas. No funny family stories in which the bird was carbonized or the the dog got into the yams or a bear came through the window or it turned out that no one knew the stranger - I thought he was with you! - and he turned out to be a rich old man who had no family, and would leave his fortune to whomever took him in. (Won’t be us; I kicked him out before pie, because he was just causing horrible arguments. Couldn’t stop bringing up politics. Flaming moderate. He’d say things like “any civilized society with our level of prosperity is ethically compelled to have a safety net, but one must consider things like disincentives to work and the ever-expanding demands of the bureaucratic administrators” and then people on the right and left would berate him with furious arguments.)

No, it’s all been lovely. They all blend together into a quarter-century of family memories - same table, same plates, different dogs patiently waiting, daughter growing up, wife remaining agelessly lovely. Coffee and pie. Tipsy games afterwards while I wash up everything. Relief when it’s done and the happy sound of a Christmas song on the radio, because now it’s time. Now that’s over and now this begins.

Being a guest is hard because you just sit and wait and talk, and periodically say “anything I can do?” No. There is nothing you can do. So you drift to the living room where the kids are playing - all these small children, where did they come from? Just a few years ago their Mom or Dad was at your house at the kid’s table. And now they’ve reproduced. Hey, there’s football! You sit with the other guys and share the  overhanging cloud of guilt - the womenfolk are doing everything, and you’re in here watching the Lions (why is it always the Lions). Occasionally one of the sisters or daughters who’s not doing anything at the moment wanders in and requests that someone explain football to her, and then she picks a team and gets excited when a player makes a great catch. Then she goes back to the kitchen and will not think about football for another year.

If I had to choose, I’d host, rather than be a guest. For some odd reason my wife at this point in life probably thinks the obverse. But I’ve noted over the years that even if you’re a guest at a family member’s thanksgiving, all the women end up in the kitchen anyway, talking amongst themselves about mysteries no man will ever know.

There’s a third option between guesting and hosting. For a few years we drove up to Fargo and had Thanksgiving Buffet at the Holiday Inn. Nothing to clean up. Turkey galore and unstinting stuffing. The hall was loud with communal consumption, and that somehow felt marvelously America. When you were done you just . . . got up and walked away and left the dishes where they were. Nothing more to do but digest, which brings an entirely new quality to the idea of gratitude.

Anyway: Happy Thanksgiving, be you guest or host. Here’s to lumpy potatoes and slabs of noble fowl. Gratitude is one of those things we figure we’ll get around to, and it’s marvelous to have a day where it’s absolutely required.