Family lore incoming! This is your chance to escape!
But if you’re staying…
I don’t remember the last time I had Thanksgiving with my family. I remember the sequence of events, but I don’t remember the year, because it was the year after my mom died, but I don’t actually know what year that was. I wasn’t speaking to my mom when she died because I’d hit my limit with her Holier Than Thou Homophobia, so I’d gone no-contact with her after my last phone call where she wanted to pray the demons out of me from hundreds of miles away. My dad and her best friend got married a few months after the funeral, so the next year was the first holiday season with a new stepmom.
My sister was still alive back then and because she was the oldest (and the richest and the most responsible and the favorite), she hosted most of the family holiday events. Even when my mom was alive, we often gathered at my sister’s house instead. For that Thanksgiving, my dad had his new wife with her and she had on a bracelet that belonged to my mom. That’s the only thing I remember about the holiday. Well, that, and it was my last one with the family because my sister died before the next Thanksgiving came along.
Over the summer, I came down to visit my cousin (mom’s sister’s daughter) and go to her 40th birthday party. While I was down here, she said that she was doing Thanksgiving at her house and I should come back down because she’d like to see me and my dad. When she was alive, my mom was her “bonus” mom. Because my mother was busy spending equal parts of her time disowning me and damning me to Hell, she had a lot of surplus parenting that she used on my cousin to help her buy a car and help her buy baby stuff and help her with life and advice. There was a little wedge between my cousin and I for years because she would remind me how much she was grieving my mom’s death and how much she missed her, while she still had a mom! A chaotic mom, yes, but at least she still had one.
That’s all water under the bridge now though. The point is, I accepted her Thanksgiving invitation and said I’d bring my dad up there as well. Wednesday night, my dad asked me if my cousin could cook. I had no idea, but I never really pictured her as one of the aunties stuck in the kitchen making a Thanksgiving feast, so I said we might need to come up with a plan. We decided that we wouldn’t eat breakfast that morning, so that we would be really hungry by mealtime. That way, if the food was bad, we would still probably eat a good part of it out of sheer hunger, and then we could stop somewhere on the way back and pick up something tastier.
When I was little, we used to have Thanksgiving with our big extended family on my mom’s side. My mom comes from a family of preachers and deacons and most of their social events are centered around the family church they founded. Thanksgiving was no different. The great aunties would fix big pans of greens, mac n cheese, yams, dressing, etc. and we would rent out a rec center or gym — anywhere you could fit a hundred people or so. I wasn’t invited to any of those after my mom died. I think they were only tolerating me as a Sodomite for Satan out of respect for her. Plus, in general, younger generations are less religious, so tying all the family events to church gatherings that eventually devolve into sermons pushed a lot of my cousins away. Still, I have lots of happy memories tied to those dinners, and in those happy memories, there is a lot of food made by women who don’t use recipes and still manage to get everything just right.
I did not imagine my cousin fitting into that tradition, so I had a little cup of yogurt and a banana in the morning around 8am and set myself to fasting until dinner. And then I had an edible on the way up there. I felt fully insured against any poor culinary experiences with enough appetite to finish at least one plate.
Timing is one thing my cousin definitely did not inherit from the great aunties. She said 2:30, so we got there around 2:10. I was traveling a man who is over 80-years-old and Google Maps said the trip would take an hour and a half. To his brain, this means the trip will take two hours, because there will always be extra traffic showing up out of nowhere that Google Maps has no idea about. So we got there early and she was not happy at all. Obviously we were just gonna sit on the couch watching football, far away from inconveniencing anyone in the kitchen, but planning for the earlier arrival of senior citizens is not something she had considered. If she missed that, would she also miss the seasoning in the dressing? or the smoked turkey in the greens? A bad sign!
But everything smelled the way it was supposed to. So I just sat down with my old man and watched men in brightly colored spandex running into each other over a brown ball for a few million dollars. The food was done shortly and other folks arrived to eat, so we lined up to make our plates, buffet style. She had:
- a fried turkey
- a baked ham
- mac n cheese
- greens
- rice and gravy
- dressing
- yams
And I went back for sixths. Baybeeeee I ate like I have not eaten in decades. And then she had the nerve to get creative with dessert! She said she wanted cheese cake, and she wanted sweet potato pie, so she made them both, but decided they would be good together as well. So, she made a sweet potato pie cheesecake and I could’ve eaten half of it by myself. I ate to capacity and then parked myself in a recliner to die happy.
But wait! Her eldest daughter arrived with an Oreo poundcake that she had just finished baking at her own apartment. Oreo poundcake you say? Alright. Let’s see what this 20-year-old child has put together. I didn’t take a picture, but it came out of the bundt pan perfectly and had just the right amount of a drizzle glaze on it. I cut a slice (that was still warm!) and after the first bite, I said “this tastes like old lady cake!” which is the highest of compliments for a Southern poundcake.
My grandma (mom’s mom, grandma to myself and the Thanksgiving cousin, great-grandma to the Oreo poundcake-baker) was basically famous for her cakes. If there was a family gathering, she had to bring cake. If you stopped by her house in the middle of the day, she’d offer you a slice of cake and a few slices to take home. If you wanted a cake for a special event, you could call her up and she’d give you a price and a time to come pick it up. This cake was that cake. It felt like Grandma’s cake, but with a little Oreo twist.
When I exclaimed, “This tastes like old lady cake!” she answered, “it should. Your grandma taught me how to make it.”
I hadn’t realized Grandma had passed down any recipes before she stopped cooking. My mom didn’t pass any of Grandma’s stuff on down to me because she didn’t want me to become more of a sissy than she’d already deemed me to be. My cousin’s mom doesn’t cook, so Grandma didn’t pass anything to her. My cousin was so busy with three kids, she didn’t have time to sit at Grandma’s knee and learn how to make cakes. But Grandma was babysitting those girls, and while she was babysitting, she was slipping them the secrets of the trade.
I hadn’t had a piece of my Grandma’s cake in over 20 years. The last time I went to visit her, she asked me if I had AIDS and told me to cut my hair because I looked too fruity. Cake ain’t worth all that, so I stopped going over to her house. I never imagined I’d have Grandma’s cake ever again, but there it was, at Thanksgiving. With Oreos. I ate two pieces and my dad packed up another three to take with us.
Thanksgiving is a terrible holiday. So many young leftists take this opportunity to virtue signal online about how celebrating Thanksgiving is actually celebrating a genocide and that we should all be ashamed of ourselves. And I say to those children that we had no Pilgrim decorations or cornucopias on the dinner table. There were no recitations of fake holiday propaganda painting a cozy picture of Pilgrims ‘n’ Indians sharing a meal. There was no mention of Thanksgiving at all.
What we did have was a day off work where orphan offshoots of my massive family could come together and share a dinner full of dishes that had been passed down for who knows how long. Thanksgiving means I got to eat my Grandma’s cake for the first time this century. No amount of virtue signaling can compete with that.
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