Traditionalesque

Dear Friends,

Thanksgiving came a couple days late to Riga this year. The actual holiday found your fellow American working like a turkey on any other day. While I didn't treat my students to anything edible, I did allow them to feast on some great words about gratitude by great writers like Erma Bombeck and Langston Hughes.

Apart from school, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Pick your jaws up off the ground, family and former roommates. It's true. One of the craziest things about living abroad is the new-found awareness of national identity. I had no idea just how American I was till I started living in Latvia. At home, I could always look forward to experiencing the sacred kitchens belonging to my mother and grandmother. I love the smell of those rooms; I love what comes from them. But my interaction with them existed only in the passive sense -- me passing by for a cookie, me delivering dishes and occasionally staying to dry a few.

Now, I have a lovely kitchen here in Riga, but as hard as I've looked, I've found no mother or grandmother. As much as my mouth waters for the steaming bowls of rama noodles extracted from my little microwave from time to time, I can't say much of anything redolent in the culinary sense has emerged from my kitchen.

Until last week.

Thanksgiving and no cooking? A cook-free kitchen zone? It just felt un-American. Untraditional.

Some weeks ago, my friends Bob and Cheryl sent out invitations to the seven of us Fulbright people and our families to come over for a Thanksgiving potluck. We were encouraged to bring along a dish or two to share. You must understand that up until this point in my life, I've operated under the assumption that in potlucky situations, everyone involved including myself, would be gastro- and astronomically much happier if I allowed someone else -- like Hostess or Pillsbury, for instance -- to do the cooking. I have been the perpetual delivery boy, never the head chef.

This time, though, there was a stirring within my bachelor's heart. Something deep within inspired the crazy notion to prepare my own dishes for once, for this Thanksgiving potluck. I can't say for sure, but I believe the idea sprung from a rare strand of homesickness. Or existential madness.

I asked myself, WWJD? (What would Janet do?). In the form of a fiery pillar from heavenly ovens above, the answer descended: Thou shall create cranberry jello salad and peanut butter no-bake cookies for Thanksgiving. Selah

Now, these two dishes were absolute staples in my formative years. There hasn't been a single dish of my mother's making that I haven't been entirely over-the-moon about, but cranberry salad and peanut butter cookies are among my favorites. I e-mailed Mom who sent the recipes. And I was off.

Miraculously, I found all of the necessary ingredients after stops at several groceries. The only major set-back was trying to mold my first batch of saturated cookies into clumps on the wax paper. Lesson learned: corn syrup and corn oil are not synonymous. Turns out no one in Latvia has ever heard of corn syrup, so I followed the sage advice to substitute maple syrup, which worked wondrously and even added another dimension of flavor to the cookies.

So, walking into Bob and Cheryl's Saturday afternoon carrying my bowl of cranberry salad -- did I mention I even drizzled the top with whipped cream and fresh mandarin? -- and two plates of peanut butter cookies, I felt kingly. I guess everyone was feeling kind of regal because with each ring of the doorbell, the counter of food came to contain another delightful creation. Our cornucopia began bursting at it's wickery seams.

Okay, I confess it did seem a little show-offy that some of the guests had to make such homemade croissants and such incredibly delicious salads and casseroles and potatoes. And just because she was the hostess, Cheryl didn't have to bake one of the best pumpkin pies I've ever tasted. But, you know, my homely little delicious peanut butter cookies held their own among the vast spread of yum.

And you know what? As we, complete strangers three months ago -- American, Latvian, Latvian-American, Russian-American, and Czech -- ate and drank and dazzled our palates, the strangest thing happened. We melded into family. Pilgrims on similar journeys pausing to satiate our bodies, to converse, to laugh. To nourish souls and give thanks.

I asked one of the couples what their grown sons back home had done for Thanksgiving. One of the guys had run in a race -- running on Thanksgiving morning was something the family had been doing for years. Both boys had called their grandmother on the family farm, another Thanksgiving tradition.

In listening to their stories, it hit me that my personal definition of Thanksgiving family tradition is rooted in presence, not absence. Apart from one abhorrently interminable Thanksgiving spent with the family of the woman I'd planned to marry after college, in twenty-eight years, I had been seated around the family table every single year. Present to read the prayer Grandpa had written and printed on an index card with a black Sharpie... present to piece together Grandma's artificial tree... present to sing the year's first round of Christmas carols... present to watch the recorded TGIF Perfect Strangers Thanskgiving Special... present to take the annual Thanksgiving Day walk up and down the quiet streets of Jacksonville. Though cheerful and relaxed, I had no clue how to handle this holiday away from home. Unlike my friends across the table whose sons had called home to Grandma on Thanksgiving as usual, I possessed no prior knowledge of how to address a Thanksgiving away from home.

So, I did what I know to do: Get up and get another piece of pie, and keep talking. As conversation ebbed and flowed I acknowledged the mosaic of traditions, memories, and expectations I alone brought to the table. And here was the really earth-shattering piece: I realized that everyone else, each one away from home, was bringing his or her own cartload of the same.

Writer Anne Lamott has an idea why we tend to stay close to our families, especially at holiday times. "Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world," she writes, "and it's so touching when you get to see something real and human. I think that's why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull -- because when people have seen you at your worst you don't have to put on the masks as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance."

By accepting each other, the family-like friends with whom I shared Thanksgiving this year gave each other the gift of marking time, in thanksgiving, together. We talked and laughed long into the night, and when I stepped back outside, many hours after having arrived, I half-expected to see the open roads of Illinois before me. I'd never been so far from my family. I'd never been so close.

Americans seem to put a lot of stock in tradition. And, I'll confess that the slightest little shift in "normalcy" has my inner-Tevye pulling on his prayer shawl and shaking a raised fist wondering what has become of tradition? Tradition connects us to the past and extinguishes fears of the future. But tradition is as flimsy as pumpkin pie crust. Not long after a marriage or birth, we can't seem to remember the way it was before she arrived. And it doesn't take long after a funeral to realize we won't be able to go on quite the same way as we did when he was with us.

Abraham Lincoln delivered his Thanksgiving proclamation on the last Thursday of November 1861, so for years many Americans continued to celebrate the holiday on the last Thursday of the month. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested Thanksgiving be permanently set on the fourth Thursday of November. His proposition was met with vehement outrage by many Americans. Could it be people had already established and grown so accustomed to their Thanksgiving traditions that they were unwilling to alter them? You betcha.

Tradition has everything to do with cranberry jello molds and phone calls and prayers and walks on empty streets and what we did last year. And yet, tradition stands independent of all of these. Tradition, whatever it is, carries meaning and such meaning is not bound to one permanent address.

Yours,

Tim

Cran-Apple Mold
2 packages (3 oz.) of jello - one orange and one cherry
1 cup boiling water
1 can of cranberry jellied sauce
1 can of applesauce
Simply pour the 2 jello mixes in a bowl. Add the boiling water and stir well. Then add the jellied cranberry sauce and applesauce and mix well. Pour into cups or a bowl and set in the refrigerator.


Unbaked Peanut Butter Cookies
1 cup sugar
1 cup corn syrup - I use Karo - this is a clear, thick syrup that I buy in a bottle.
Combine the sugar and corn syrup, stirring well. Heat until you see tiny bubbles beginning on the side of the pan.
Then remove from heat and add 2 cups peanut butter and 4 cups Special K cereal. Mix well.
Then drop from a teaspoon onto wax paper or a plate.
(You could use some other cereal of similar type - and often I use crunchy peanut butter that has peanuts in it, but you don't have to.)