Tag: Thanksgiving

Comfort Food

I am craving a baked potato with butter and sour cream and chives. Sure sign I’m stressed. Special food cravings are one of the happier signs of stress in my life. And in my experience, food cravings beat booze cravings by a country mile.

I have a list of favorite foods. (Doesn’t everyone?) Pumpkin pie, which is timely. Molasses cookies (no one made them better or more often than my Nanny). My girlfriend Diane’s amazing trifle filled with fresh fruit (usually raspberries), fresh whipped cream, a cake base filled with something boozy and delicious but non-intoxicating and topped with slivered almonds. (And maraschino cherries? Or did I just add them in my mind’s eye?)

Special but sad as Diane’s trifle is usually only served at Christmas and other super special occasions during the year. Serving it more often would likely diminish the cachet. Sigh.

Then there is any kind of Chinese dim sum. Barbeque pork buns. Shrimp dumplings. Potstickers. If I was on a desert island with room service, my daily food order would be taken from an authentic Chinese food menu. No doughy sweet and sour chicken balls for this gal.

Or Indian. Anything cooked with curry and coconut milk gets high marks. That can be chicken, beef, goat, or vegetables. Some of the most delicious dishes I’ve ever tasted were some variety of vegetarian curry with nary a shred of meat.

Back here on the North American continent, a grilled cheese sandwich made with perennial, plastic, waxy, orange American cheese slices and bread and butter pickles on the side is my version of gastronomic heaven. I did say comfort food, not healthy food.

With American Thanksgiving tomorrow, I’ve been overwhelmed this past couple of weeks by unrelenting food come-ons. The allure of a scrumptious turkey dinner with all the trimmings is offered everywhere.

Images abound on TV, in store flyers, on store shelves of perfectly roasted golden brown turkey, bright red cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes (as opposed to mashed potatoes for a pop of color I believe) and sides. Apparently an American side favorite is green bean casserole. Never tried it so I don’t get it. Maybe one day.

My must-have, go-to, absolutely favorite turkey dinner side is stuffing. I would almost eat that as my Thanksgiving entree. I’ve rarely met a stuffing I didn’t love. It is a very hard dish to screw up.

Yet again, like Diane’s trifle, stuffing is best reserved for special occasions. Even I can see that too frequent consumption of a butter soaked, high carb, and high cholesterol dish isn’t medically advisable.

Grocery stores offer everything you need to celebrate Thanksgiving at home. Our favorite local restaurants offer an array of turkey dinner specials with all the trimmings.

We are lucky to have the choice. If we don’t want the hustle and hassle of making a turkey dinner that saddles us with three days worth of dirty dishes and leftover turkey until January, eat out.

Thanksgiving seems way too close to Christmas in the US anyway. Thanksgiving decorations sit side by side on the shelves with miniature Christmas trees. The marketing tsunami seems relentless from late September when the Halloween hype starts until we get through Thanksgiving and then Christmas.

Christmas is the one special day that shuts down our collective consumerism for about 24 hours. That’s just long enough to enjoy some sacred space and time with friends and loved ones before we hit the Boxing Day sales.

Make it through the festive New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day dinners and voila!! Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.

If there is consolation to be found in bracing ourselves to prepare for all these non-stop fall celebrations, it is that food is usually abundant and delicious. I’ll take comfort in that.

Facing Forward

Today the curator of the Ultimate Blog Challenge on Facebook asks us to plan the 90 days after the challenge ends on October 31st. Halloween for those of you who have been sleeping under a rock.

God knows I’ve tried to ignore the incessant commercial come-ons. How many Kit Kat bars and Reese’s Pieces can one person eat anyway?

This will be the third monthlong Ultimate Blog Challenge I’ve finished this year. Ninety days ahead takes us through November, December until the last day of January. Oy, do I have plans.

November 1st is always a new year’s day of sorts for me. It is loosely associated with All Hallows Eve or Hallowe’en. According to pagan Celtic traditions, it is said that on this day the spirits of the dead are most clearly present on planet Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain

It also marks the time of harvest and beginning of the “dark part of the year.” The only harvest I participate in is doing my part in filling up the sacks of local trick and treaters.

As my spiritual “New Year,” I do have some modest resolutions for the next ninety days.

Stay healthy. That’s always Number One and always will be. I am a devotee of the “health equals wealth” philosophy. Without health, wealth don’t mean much except applying it to attempts to restore it.

Develop a debt management plan. This is also a perpetual theme in my life. I would love to be one of those people sitting on bags of money. I’m not. I’m a very low profile, ordinary financial citizen. So I manage debt.

Survive the holidays. There is a swack of them coming up in the next ninety days. If you go by the dictates of advertisers, you could go broke tricking out and tearing down and retricking out your house for the tsunami of “blessed events” coming up.

My strategy is to do as little as humanly possible for each of these events: Halloween (in a couple of days); Thanksgiving; Christmas celebrations (which is essentially the whole month of December); New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. And all of January for recovery.

If the marketing strategy is to keep us on our toes by distracting us with one holiday after another that we are expected to execute “perfectly,” it is rather brilliant.

And if we don’t have the spirit or means to pursue holiday perfection, no matter. A whole lot of compensatory products are available out there to make us feel better about not “being perfect.”

If we are single and don’t have an existing or created family to go to all the trouble for, so much the better.

And, of course, I plan to keep writing. This blog has surprised me. Over 225 days in a row so far. The biggest surprise has been that I’ve managed to keep doing it every day and plan to continue. It centers me and reinforces my own views about the world and what’s happening in it. I wish I were more unfailingly optimistic about what I see.

By January 31, 2024, I expect to be six weeks away from the goal I set up on March 14th, 2024 of writing a daily blog post for a full year. I set out thinking I would have a book manuscript by then. That seems unlikely.

There have been an inordinate amount of distractions this year. Challenges I didn’t expect. Challenges I took on that cost me more emotionally and financially than originally anticipated.

External demands that ranged from irritating to overwhelming. I was never quite sure starting out which way a challenge was going to turn out. Life is surprising that way.

In spite of the roller coaster I’ve been on this past year, I am happy to report that marketing soaked holiday celebrations have not been among them. And won’t be, dieu merci.