by Joffre Swait
Thanksgiving, like many holidays, can be as stressful for some as it can be joyful for others. On Thanksgiving, the cook(s) classically labors, frets, worries, hangs hopes on the success of the souffle, and forgets to not make that stuffing recipe that father-in-law complains about every year.
We tell ourselves to be at peace, to pray, to be full of joy during the holidays. We tell ourselves to be grateful. But when we seem to be the ones doing all the work and all the giving, thankfulness can be hard. Nonetheless, it is necessary. Here we are in God’s wonderful world, in olive groves we did not plant, surrounded by curse and blessing of epic proportions. We must be thankful, even if we were the ones who bore the brunt of the sun and watched as the newcomers got the same wage.
What’s more, once the grand feast is plated up, your work isn’t done. And these newcomers have already finished all the cranberry sauce.
Since it is often difficult for the makers to avoid falling into this tearful way on Thanksgiving, I thought it appropriate to offer some reasons to be grateful for being the cook.
If you cook with any regularity, you already know these things. But the change from quotidian to festal eating highlights them to all parties. Suddenly every dish is made special and fraught with meaning and the weight of history, every decision to serve this instead of that worthy of praise and condemnation.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time of gratitude for God’s gifts. You, dear cook, in all your service, are elevated to a role of highest honor. You manifest God’s kind provisions to his beloved in tangible and visceral ways. You conceive, you create, you lay your talents and provender before your welcome guests. And whether they are grateful or not, you are sanctified. Your people may seem ever ungrateful, but you don’t provide for them to receive thanks. You do it because you love them.
At Thanksgiving the cook presides over a liturgy that not only connects us to our Father in Heaven, but to our brothers in times past. This, by the way, is the only acceptable reason for making a sweet potato casserole covered in brown sugar and marshmallows: because your grandmother made it that way and your great-uncles loved it. We live in a society that, on the one hand, abounds in varieties and origins of food that would have boggled the minds of previous generations, and on the other, moves toward a sloth in the preparation of food so great that we don’t even remember our own mother’s recipes. At Thanksgiving we remember at least some of the old ways. And you are the one presiding over this great feast of mourning over the dead and joy for the living.
You are also coquus semper reformando, the always reforming cook. You honor tradition, but you are able to take the lead in establishing new family traditions.
The cranberry sauce we use on Thanksgiving is my dad’s. It has been in our family for only twenty years. But who knows how much farther into time it will travel, being cut off in some streams of our family after perhaps only a generation, while proceeding down other streams for many ages of men? On Thanksgiving every dish holds its weight in glory.
Not only has time become your playground, but so has all the earth. Three hundred short years ago, would you have had much black pepper in your house? Marshmallows in a variety of size and color? Oranges from over there? Pineapple from who knows where? And yet all these, thanks be to our God, are before you now, waiting for you to fulfill their destinies, which their fathers labored in darkness over for so long. To past generations of northern Christians, getting hold of an orange in winter was enough of a feat that the orange would be featured in the Christmas stocking; we still cling, without thinking, to such traditions. Will you, who live in Wisconsin, fail to be grateful for the bags and bushels of oranges available to you? You will not. You will give glory to men, and oranges, and cranberries, and God who made them, by putting orange zest and orange bits in your cranberry sauce.
Take therefore your place of honor with gratitude. Sweat over the stove, weary your arms with the stirring of sauces. Be thankful for the honor bestowed upon you by holy God, who has chosen you to preside over a symphony of trials past and glories to come, of lands lost and lands conquered, of ships at the last barren of ale and ships on the nonce laden with fruit, of mighty men dead and children given new life, of long hard winters and help unlooked for.
You, good lady, kind sir, may hold your wooden spoon up as a scepter.
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Euan Murray is a prop forward for the Scotland rugby team. He plays professionally for Worcester in the Premiership. Unlike Liddell, who was a pretty boy and played on the wing, Murray is one of the big ugly bruisers who play in the front row. What do they have in common? Besides rugby, that they won’t play on Sunday.
