Love or hate Thanksgiving?

[frazzled]

10. Love

I'm all into baking pies (and pies, and pies) and completely overdoing the cooking.

What I love about Thanksgiving is its relative universality (for Americans, and often even new Americans). It's not a religious holiday, and I like that everybody is sitting down to the same approximate meal. I've been to Italian Thanksgivings that added a homemade lasagna course and bottles of Strega at the end, and I imagine that there are equally wonderful Chinese and Middle Eastern and other varieties of Thanksgiving. But they all involve turkey and trimmings and conviviality around a table, and they're all about the wonderful melting pot that is America.

((Okay, I know you're going to say not everyone has turkey. And so true: for many years I've had vegetarians at my table (including my son and daughter-in-law and daughter). With the panoply of vegetable and potato dishes and first courses and appetizers and deserts, I generally just let them feast on all that, making sure to substitute vegetable stock for chicken stock in all the dishes. But no way is some ersatz tofurkey dish getting onto my table (though I did do homemade French-breaded tofu cutlets last Thanksgiving.) ))

This year, the vegetarians are all out of town, so real sausage will go into the stuffing again, along with the chestnuts and mushrooms and onions and carrots and celery.