My sister-in-law Lee has lived all over the United States ranging from Boston to Provo to Tallahassee to Big Rapids (that’s in Michigan) to Cherry Hills (New Jersey, near Philly). Wherever she moves she then claims that her current home is the site of the first Thanksgiving. Then she cites obscure facts to back it up (really, El Paso claims to have had the first Thanksgiving, Michigan claims the “first modern Thanksgiving in the Midwest,” New Jersey claims that Thanksgiving as we know it was created there and that the first Thanksgiving football game was Harvard vs. Yale played in, wait for it, Hoboken, NJ). So this is tradition for Lee, but other than that, she’s not big on Thanksgiving traditions—she’s even roasted a chicken instead of a turkey and done other nontraditional sides, and her family is the type to run a 5k in the morning.
But she is a huge proponent of the Christmas ball on Christmas Eve and has claimed that it is the family tradition and that it must be adhered to. In the Elliott family, one person is assigned the Christmas ball. That person buys roughly one million pieces of gum, packages of floss, and cracker jack boxes, then wraps each individually, then connects each with tissue paper until you have a giant tissue-paper ball that must be handed around and unwrapped for hours. There’s a saran wrap version you can see here. Marrying into the family, I was brought into this tradition for a while until I saw a CNN report in which prisoners at Guantanamo were doing a Christmas ball and losing their minds after three straight days of wrapping and unwrapping, so that tradition died in the Laws family.
Why do I say all this? I love the holiday season because I love the traditions that connect me back to my ancestors and that I pass on to my descendants. You should definitely have traditions. Of course, joining families through marriage means blending traditions and creating new ones. Naturally, for the first fifteen years or so of our marriage, this meant doing Lauren’s traditions.
I didn’t live near extended family growing up, so our Thanksgivings were usually small—just mom, dad, my brother and sister, and me. A couple of years in San Antonio, we had the Aguirres over from down the street. They would bring homemade tamales, which is a tradition that should go forever. For us, we ate the big meal, then watched the Dallas Cowboys, then often finished the day with a screening of Patton. I loved it. Starting around my seventh grade year, we bought our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. The whole holiday was really quiet and simple. I loved it.
Lauren grew up with extended family and when we moved to MA, we got folded into the Thanksgiving extravaganza, which involved pretty much every person connected to the Greenslades (my mother-in-law’s maiden name) within five hundred square miles. A family football game before the meal was obligatory, and in my first year, I laid out Uncle Bob (sorry, Bob!). In the years that followed, we had other great moments. There was Grammie Olive telling Lauren, “Whatsa matter with Gordon? It’s like he has no personality!” Then there was Olive going next level body shaming on the family girls, milling around late in the day and exclaiming, “Oh, you’re still eating?”
I was often at my grumpiest because I spent most of those years chasing toddlers around and failing to prevent disasters. At one family gathering (which wasn’t Thanksgiving but had all the same folks), Grant grabbed someone’s red wine. I went leaping over furniture, but too late—he pitched it on the Hales’ brand new carpet.
Another time, I was herding Lucia and looked over just in time to see two-year-old Lindsay take a swig from one of the uncle’s glasses of Scotch. Another memorable time, we all gathered at the function center of Olive’s retirement home, but she begged off owing to “diarrhea,” which was her shorthand for “not feeling it today, peace out, suckas.” There was also the time my sister-in-law Lisa sat a person away from me on the couch, reached around that person, and started rubbing my shoulder, which froze me as I tried to figure out the family’s unwritten code of familiarity. Then she exclaimed, “Woah! I thought you were my brother Martin.” Whew!
But one year, Marti and Leon (my inlaws) traveled out of state, and we hosted our own Thanksgiving with just our kids plus Lisa and my other sister-in-law, Meredith. Marti didn’t think we could pull it off—not just the Laws, but Mere and Lisa. We got many helpful “reminders” and “Are you sure?” and so forth.
I saw an article in the Boston Globe titled something like, “Turkey Is Boring, It Doesn’t Have to Be.” It led me to this recipe. I declared myself in charge of turkey and made that. It changed our Thanksgiving lives. Graham, age four, made us proud by skipping all dishes and eating a Gogurt. After dinner, we lounged in pajamas, watched the Cowboys, and watched movies. Even Lauren conceded it was a great way to do Thanksgiving. It didn’t end large family holidays—in fact, it made me responsible for turkey at all of them (I do fried and smoked turkeys too and have since made as many as three turkeys totaling nearly forty-five pounds at times).
However we spend the day, we have kept my family’s tradition of getting the Christmas tree the day after and immediately decorating the house. Lindsay is home from college this year and affirmed multiple times that these traditions must be honored. This year, we’ll be heading to the Silver Lake rivalry football game to watch Graham’s one and only year in the marching band. Thanksgiving rivalry games are a big deal in Massachusetts, which can make the family feast more awkward—we know cousins who played each other then had to have dinner together. After the game, it’s home for dinner with Lauren’s sister and a handful of folks from Church. Low key. Laws tradition.
You should follow tradition, too. Except when you shouldn’t. Then you should break it.
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