And the bars—don’t start me on the bars. There’s a make-your-own trail mix bar, a choose-your-own seafood bar, a decant-your-own honey bar, a mix-and-match cookie bar, and a hot food bar with enough variety to satisfy everyone from the most humorless vegan to the world’s biggest carnivore. [Which is the Southern Elephant Seal. (I looked it up.)] One day I stopped by early after a dentist appointment and I stumbled across the breakfast bar, complete with biscuits and gravy. So magnificent was the sight that I wept a little.
When other grocery stores dream of an afterlife, this is what they picture, with twenty kinds of fresh gelato and sorbet made daily and cheese sellers who say, “Hmm, I haven’t tasted that particular tomme de chèvre, either—let’s open it up and sample it together!”
Through the confluence of unbelievably fresh product, a little training, and finally owning some decent equipment, I’ve come to love cooking. Turns out I’m fearless in the kitchen and Fletch is constantly delighted by the dishes I make. Yeah, there’s an occasional misstep—candy apple pork chops, I’m looking at you—but I’ve found real Zen at the bottom of my enamel cast-iron pot.
In fact, last year Fletch and I tackled our first fully blown, fancy-set-table, official Thanksgiving dinner as our attempt to create a new holiday tradition. In the past we’d gotten together with family, but as our relationship became increasingly strained, [Read: certain members became bat-shittier.] we thought we’d be a lot happier on our own and this was our first go of it.
Our menu was outstanding and I’m not sure what the best part was. The prosciutto-wrapped asparagus was the perfect blend of crisp and salty and the creamed pearl onions made me want to bury my face in the chafing dish and go at them feeding-trough-style.
But as Fletch and I sat there at our grown-up table in our first real dining room—with a chandelier and everything!—eating a wonderful meal and drinking out of proper wineglasses, the venture into new traditions felt like a waste of time. I spent two days in the kitchen and we finished stuffing ourselves in about twenty minutes. The end result, although delicious, wasn’t worth the effort and felt like a huge letdown.
Our other Thanksgiving option, going out to dinner alone, feels equally depressing, so we decided that our new new tradition is full-on denial.
I tell Stacey, “We’re just going to be all, ‘Thanksgiving? Sorry, I think you dialed the wrong number.’”
Stacey keeps stealing confused glances at me while she drives. “Let me get this straight—you plan to ignore Thanksgiving?”
“Exactly.”
“Honey, denial is not a strategy.”
“Pfft. Denial is absolutely a strategy, particularly for the kind of holidays that depress you. For example, how did you celebrate Valentine’s Day last year?”
Stacey’s lips get all scrunchy, and her voice is clipped. “I don’t remember.”
“See? Denial. Works like a charm. [Please don’t worry about Stacey. When this happened, she was about four days away from meeting the man of her dreams. They got married in May 2011, and he gives her the best Valentine’s Days anyone could possibly imagine. I’m talking diamonds, champagne, and poetry. He treats her like the (bossy) goddess she is] Can you blame me for not wanting to recognize the day because it bums me out? All holidays do. Always have. I’ve hated the time period between my birthday in November and January second since I was a kid because, without fail, every single holiday devolved into big-time family chaos.”
“How so?” Stacey gets distressed when I bring up familial insanity, likely because she comes from a functional family where everyone not only loves each other, but actually likes one another, too. No one tells anyone else they’re fat and no one gets into a screaming match over using too much hot water, nor does anyone continue to hold a grudge about shit that happened in 1976.
It’s so weird.
“Give me a specific,” she prompts.
“Let’s see… well, every year like clockwork my mother would try to punish my father because he liked being home for the holiday instead of driving seventeen hours in the snow each way over a weekend so she could be with her extended family, none of whom he liked, so that was fun.”
“That’s it?”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, please. We’d spend the week leading up to the holiday dealing with her sulking and pouting and I’d be all, ‘What are you, fifty?’ Then the actual day of Christmas or Thanksgiving or Easter would roll around and she’d freak out because she spent so much time pouting and sulking that she’d be entirely off schedule in creating the meal. And despite having help from me, my dad, and later my sister-in-law, dinner wouldn’t be ready until ten p.m. and she’d be mad at us for complaining that we were hungry. Of course, she’d sabotage a situation already made super-tense due to starvation by unilaterally deciding madness like, ‘I’m going to make this a fat-free Thanksgiving!’”
Stacey blanches. “That is a crime against humanity.”
“Right? Plus, she believed that we should be all Norman Rockwell–y and, like, sit around in candlelight and listen to carols, and you know what? That’s a lovely thought and we should pencil that in. But when everyone’s gathered in the family room and we’re all quietly enjoying each other’s company for once by hanging out and watching the James Bond marathon on TBS, that is not the time to yank the television cord out of the wall and demand we share our feeeeelings. Because we feeeeel? Like watching Goldfinger.”
Stacey laughs and says, “That can’t possibly be true,” while I nod emphatically. We arrive at WFM and find a cherry parking spot on the second floor next to the door. We exit the car and enter the store, taking the long escalator that dumps out right by the bar. “Need to cocktail up before you finish the story?”
“Yes, but I won’t. Oh, and this totally
