In my childhood, Thanksgiving began the weekend before. We’d drive 60 miles in the family minivan to my maternal grandparents’ home outside of Annapolis, Maryland. It was in a subdivision called Gingerville, where each street is named for an herb or spice, several of which were ingredients in the stuffing my grandfather prepared from memory with near-obsessive precision.
My sisters, cousins, parents, aunt, uncle and grandparents fit around the dining room table extended by a 4-by-4-foot card table. At the extension table, my cousins and I thought ourselves ingenious innovators when we’d stuff a small amount of turkey and each side into a roll to make “Thanksgiving in a bun.”
We’d have dinner on Thanksgiving Day with my father’s family at my grandparents’ house in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was a minimum three-table ordeal necessarily served buffet-style. For the 20 of us in my generation, table assignments were a contentious matter, especially for those of us near cutoff in birth order.
As Poppy aged, he’d clear the buffet to make way for dessert earlier and earlier. For a few years, we’d be lucky to get seconds. By the end, those of us at table three would have to act quickly to secure firsts. We’d gather in the family room after dinner to watch the end of the Cowboys game. As Washington football fans, we always had Dallas to cheer against provided we didn’t nod off while so comfortably sated.
Between these family gatherings fell a tradition that persists despite the passage of years, changes in circumstance and the logistical nightmare of Thanksgiving Wednesday travel on congested D.C. area highways. For more than 35 years, one of my father’s oldest friends has hosted a large Thanksgiving Eve gathering. His name is Michael, but my sisters and I know him as Uncle Chef. It’s a fitting nickname for the organizer of a meal that always includes vats of his signature fettucine alfredo along with the biggest turkey he can find. One year, the turkey barely fit in the oven, which would prompt most to purchase smaller turkeys. Undeterred, Uncle Chef tore apart his kitchen and installed an industrial oven by the following November. These days, the primary turkey (there is always an auxiliary bird that Michael’s brother deep fries) weighs in at about 45 pounds.
These three Thanksgivings are favorite memories from my childhood and teenage years. As my grandparents aged and died and a new generation ballooned, my aunts and uncles began hosting gatherings of their own children and grandchildren. Thanksgiving Day became more relaxed and restful, but I missed the holiday with my cousins. Wednesday night with my parents’ friends is the childhood Thanksgiving tradition I have yet to outlive.
In the last decade or so, the concept of “Friendsgiving” has spread, though Uncle Chef was decades ahead of the trend. Some say the term was coined in a tweet. Others insist it references the sitcom Friends. Buzzfeed publishes listicles praising Friendsgiving over Thanksgiving.
Political debates, pointed questions about relationships and family plans, drunk uncles, sanctimonious aunts, backhanded compliments from cousins and other trials make Thanksgiving an irredeemably burdensome chore, or so the argument goes. Friendsgiving is what the holiday ought to be.
At around the same age Uncle Chef was when he first welcomed his friends, I began hosting an early Thanksgiving dinner for friends in my adopted home of Rhode Island. I’m stubbornly insistent on serving dinner at one continuous row of tables, and the party has become an annual test to determine the maximum number of people who can sit for dinner in a 1,000-square-foot apartment’s double-parlor living and dining space (the answer is 20). It’s an established enough tradition that friends will sometimes ask, “When is your Friendsgiving this year?” They mean well, but I wince at the term. I am unwilling to drive that semantic wedge between celebrations that are, to me, essentially the same.
The term seems to draw lines between family and friends that my experiences in adult life have only blurred. When I raise a glass before the Thanksgiving meal my roommate and I host in our apartment, my toast is not to friends who are like family, but to friends who are family. I’ve lived 400-plus miles from my immediate family for more than a decade. Invitations to friends’ homes for holidays like Easter that I spend in New England mean the world. Serving dinner to as many guests as I can fit in my apartment once a year barely begins to reciprocate those and other gifts. It is both the most and least I can do.
I am blessed by treasured memories of holidays with family — memories still made at my parents’ home, albeit with fewer of us. I was close with each of my four grandparents. Any frustrating exchanges I’ve had with relatives over the dinner table never led to grudges.
I miss the feeling of coming in from the cold to Mimi and Poppy’s well-heated home, warmed further by dozens of loved ones crowded within. It is precisely that feeling I try to share with my own guests. Looking down a long table surrounded by so many beloved friends is the closest I’ve come to feeling it since the last Thanksgiving with Mimi and Poppy or the last Christmas Eve dinner with Grandma and Pop-Pop.
For many, family gatherings are inhospitable environments that reopen painful wounds. That is a tragically valid experience that I won’t minimize. Some cannot help but compare the comfortable company of friends to bitter experiences of family. I won’t tell people with that experience what to call their celebrations. But I worry that getting caught up in the meme, allowing the novelty and levity baked into the portmanteau “Friendsgiving,” risks rendering family celebrations stale and regrettable obligations in comparison. It feels preclusive of familial joy.
The way I see it, every celebratory meal with loved ones is Thanksgiving — especially the carbohydrate- and butter-rich meals we share in November. When I pour and drink from the love of family and of friends on and around the Thanksgiving holiday, they are not distinct vintages. They are the same drink — rich and velvety, changed but not diminished with age, the kind that warms the body from the inside out.
And no matter how much I drink from it, and with whom, my cup overflows.
Michael Hagan was raised in Maryland before attending Providence College. He is a writer and higher education marketer residing in Rhode Island with his two cats and a friend with whom he argues annually about whether to spatchcock their turkey or roast it intact. They agree on most else.