’Tis the Season
It’s a good thing the winter holidays start with a feast. You’re going to need all your energy to keep up with the oncoming season.
Thanksgiving, only a week hence, is a command performance throughout America. Anticipation and anxiety pair as we prepare for the communal feasting demanded by our native holiday.
Have we the time, energy and skill to manage a multi-course menu? Or had we better eat out or carry in? The Bay Weekly family spans the options, with some cooking … others going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house … some dining out … and others carrying out grocery-store feasts of turkey, ham and roast beef — each with its side dishes and desserts.
Even more complex, can we manage the dynamics of our families?
Who’s coming to dinner? Ask that innocent question, and you’ll hear stories that make you classify your own family in the ranks of the nearly sane.
I’ve celebrated a whole lot of Thanksgivings. Most have approached with their fair share of trepidation and doubt. A few lived up to my worst fears. There was the Thanksgiving when … I could tell you that story, but you could tell me your own, just as traumatic.
Yet I look forward to this year’s feast with hope, encouraged by the wisdom of writer Caiti Sullivan, whose Thanksgivings are far fewer than mine.
“The food on the Thanksgiving table is a bounty to share while celebrating family, friends and the joys of life,” she writes in this week’s feature story, Loving Your Leftovers. “Preparing the feast is a labor of love among us.”
That’s just what Thanksgiving is about. What better way there than affirming her words in our hearts?
As well as a good attitude, Caiti brings us six recipes for transforming Thanksgiving leftovers into a continuing feast.
Leftovers, after all, are one of the few certainties we who cook the Thanksgiving feast can depend on. With all that’s going on, we can’t be sure the turkey will be moist, the gravy lump-free, the guests timely or Uncle Max sober. But there will be leftovers. To that end, I buy a 20-plus-pound turkey for eight or 10 people, and I collect a tall stack of carryout containers. My family and my guests have read Caiti’s recipes, and we’re all eager to eat them.
Christmas Is Coming
Then, before you’ve worked your way through the leftovers, begins the countdown toward Christmas. It’s a season worth savoring whatever your faith.
The fun starts Thursday, Nov. 20, when you can Trot for a Turkey through Watkins Park’s Winter Festival of Lights or walk your dog through Lights on the Bay at Sandy Point State Park.
In this issue, Bay Weekly keeps you up with the fun in Season’s Bounty: Your Essential Guide to Holiday Happenings. Illuminations, Shops and Sales, Santa Sightings, Holidays at the Theater, Skate Your Way into the Holidays and a day-by-day calendar — plus dozens of advertisers offering wondrous things — stuff its 48 pages with seasonal opportunity for you, the kids, family, friends and visitors. Open it up today and fill your calendar from ours.
Without Season’s Bounty, you won’t know what you’re missing.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]