Assocationary #1 - Thanksgiving
What I associate with Thanksgiving.
Associationary is a dictionary of associations. It explores how we define words based on our lived experiences and not on static dictionary definitions. I created it to reflect the actual complexity of language use and to disrupt easy definitions of English, America, and identity.
What memories and experiences define this word for you? Please feel free to share your lived definitions and associations in the comments here!
I am 38 years old. I don’t remember the the first 5 turkey days or so, so I can really only speak to 33 of them. The first 2 my family celebrated in Utah and the next 3 in Rhinebeck, NY. I celebrated the next 13 in New York at my grandma’s (we called her Nana).
How many in the corporate Media define Thanksgiving:
It’s usually about how to talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner or how to avoid talking politics. Usually, such an article suggested how to avoid that conservative uncle. But that popularized narrative is not what I experienced…or what I lived and remember. I divided the post by locations: New York, Nevada, California, and Virginia.
New York
We’d drive 15mins south from my tiny village of Tivoli to Red Hook to eat some turkey, stuffing, and some kind of veggy. I never touched the cranberry sauce…still don’t!
In upstate NY, the drive to Nana’s house was on windy upstate NY roads that passed the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. I remember I loved staring at the trees whipping past my field of vision: the few remaining, tenacious red, yellow, and orange leaves twitched and flickered like weak flames on the exposed brown trunks and branches of the maple and oak trees, like whole fields filled with wooden candelabras on either side of the road. The last flickering light of Fall in the onsetting frigid cold…
On Norton Rd, you had to accelerate either up a sudden rise midway on Norton Rd. or down the famous yet little known 10 foot drop on the way back. My siblings and I called it a ‘rollercoaster’ on the way to Nana’s house for how it made our stomachs squeamish. I did it for our 4 girls for the first time when we visited this October (best part is they didn’t know it was coming). They each yelled, screamed, and laughed as their stomachs unexpectedly rose and fell.
We would watch some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC before watching the NFL Thanksgiving Classic. My Dad pulled for the Chicago Bears, cuz Jim McMahon, Walter Payton, William “the Refigerator” Perry, and Dick Butkiss. My curly, black-haired pilot and Uncle Geoff rooted for the Minnesota Vikings. I loved watching Barry Sanders juke around defenders, and so I rooted for the Detroit Lions…in vain. They fell like dominoes to Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers of the 90s. Before halftime, about 3 adults would be snoozing on the couch cushions - my dad, Conk, and Geoff (usually). I didn’t get it - but now I do! The Bears play the Lions tomorrow…
We ate at the little kids foldout card table, decorated for the occasion. My aunt Jane often drove up from Nyack to share her thinly iced gingerbread turkey cutout cookies and walk to the aerodrome, some of us throwing footballs to each other on the way there. The adults would talk of past aerodrome events, people, and life-saving moments in those self-built WWI-era planes (they all played roles in the weekend airshow drama of Black Baron and Sir Percy Goodfellow from the 60s to the 90s). In fact, my dad loved airplanes, he persuaded my mom to name us after airplanes - Matthew (my aviator dad’s name), Sky King (after the 50s tv show), and Mitchell the B-25 Mitchell (Dooliddle Tokyo raid fame).
My brothers and I just played football outside. Once everyone woke up from the turkey nap, we’d all walk Old Stone Church Road after a couple hours of puzzles and games, and I would later walk downstairs to the garage to drink Barq’s root beer from the fridge. I wouldn’t bring it upstairs, just enjoy it downstairs in the open space away from the adults lol. We’d place on my Nana’s workout devices (she loved snow skiing, and since we didn’t, we’d pretend we were on her skiing device).
The day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday), we would drive to Battenfeld’s Christmas Tree farm just east of Red Hook where we all would meander the hilly tree lanes, drink hot chocolate, and find the ‘perfectly-shaped’ blue spruce to put in our living room (my Dad always said the prickly pine needles kept our prying fingers from feeling the gifts lol - he was partially right). My dad loved cutting it down, and we would get covered in sap as we hauled it to the packing area to strap it to the top of our car. We would also often watch A Christmas Story (bet we called it Ralphie) that night as we ate Thanksgiving leftovers. Is it crazy to say we never shopped Black Friday cuz this was our tradition? I did Black Friday shop once in California, and those shops were ransacked, especially the Redlands Walmart…
Nevada
While attending Brigham Young University in Fall 2004, a friend from Nevada drove me to his family’s place in Elko to spend Thanksgiving (my 1st Thanksgiving away). So many firsts: we got started at night and drove a massive 4-door something West on I-80 through the glowing white salt flats (even when the moon came out, less moon halo in drier atmospheres). We listened to the mellow yet peppy Postal Service songs via his 6-disc disc changer mounted in the trunk of his car. I had seen plenty of stars and planets peering through clouds and humid atmospheres as I camped in the wooded Adirondacks and Catskills growing up. But I was not prepared for the radiant brilliance of a dark sky full of crisp blazing stars. Because the thick wooded landscapes of the East prevent a clear horizon to horizon visibility like I was seeing then, for the first time in my life, I witnessed the curvature of the earth as we sped across the glowing salt flats. Peering through my telescope on top of the snow outside my house in New York conditioned me to standing in a wintery white ground, but not an entire, expansive, curved landscape stretching in every direction beyond the highway to every horizon. A true canopy or blanket of peppered light.
California
From 2011 to 2020, we ate Thanksgiving with who would become family to me - my wife’s mom, sisters, and father-in-law. Ping pong in the cold garage, or rather, sting pong with the brothers-in-law (run around the table, cycling through who hits the ball in either opposing positions, if you miss the ball, you don’t lose points, you just lift your shirt, cover your face with your paddle, and hope your opponent misses your exposed stomach and chest). Otherwise the light plastic ball leaves a quarter sized welt - doesn’t really hurt, just momentarily stings, depending on how hard your opponent wants to laugh. I only ever came away with 2 or 3 welts - and inflicted about the same on my opponents. Sadistic, and fun.
Sitting around a looong table and attached foldout table to fit all 20 of us, we would share what we were grateful for. A few years in to celebrating in California, my mother-in-law proudly reads of the Mayflower because her side of the family descends from Governor Bradford, so she displays the plaque bearing her honorary membership in the Bradford Society. It’s a poignant story of people seeking religious tolerance and political freedom, not in the least because of the anti-American sentiment I have witnessed in media narratives and my graduate programs, but because as latter-day saint Christians, we are aware of our minority Christian view that was heavily persecuted throughout the 19th century but has become more accepted since. So, we find ourselves loosely bound up in, or at least very extended recipients of, that long ago, 400-year-old event that initiated the first sense of what religious tolerance, and a thanksgiving, could be in America.
Virginia
Since Fall 2020, in our late 30s, my wife and I have made our own Thanksgiving dinners for us and our 4 girls, trying out our own recipes. We make a mean green been dish, with pepper flakes, mushrooms, and bacon. We play board games mostly, like Catan or any number of card games, which Nicole still beats me at. We make desserts the day of so they are fresh and warm later in the day, like pumpkin bread or pumpkin pie. We watch some new movie favorites like Klaus and Christmas Chronicles (both on Netflix).
We are driving East later today to Williamsburg to spend it with my sister, her husband, and their 4 kids. Cooking, musketry, and tons of other activities in Colonial Williamsburg are on the itinerary for this Friday or Saturday. Maybe I’ll post some pics here to update this post…
But that’s how my life experiences and associations define Thanksgiving for me. Feel free to share what you associate with Thanksgiving.
What I’m grateful for:
I’m just glad to have our 4 girls, and to be alive and have the opportunity to complete a PhD as hard as this freaking thing is on a regular basis. I’m grateful my wife (yes not my partner) lives with me and finds me desirable, appealing, and funny (I think I’m funny, but for her to think so - I feel like Jerry Seinfeld or Dave Chappelle!). I hope I prove her proud, and that I’m a friend and husband she can not just love but be proud of.
I also thank each of you, the subscribers to Project Luminas. Your support motivates me to draft and pursue this project (my dissertation has really taken precedence this Fall). 95 of you subscribed so far - and as a practicing writer who wishes to improve communication and understanding, and not just share my perspective, I hope to read your responses for how your experiences define Thanksgiving (or your own holiday season) for you.