Thanksgiving

Saturday

Joan Collins

Christmas in Los Angeles and London

“Never again!” I sigh every January 6, as I pack away the abundance of Christmas decorations lovingly collected over the decades. “It’s too much!” I moan to Percy. “Let’s go to a hot island next year and get away from it all…” But I never do, because I just love Christmas. Every year in early November I eagerly unpack multiple boxes tenderly packed two years earlier because we like to spend Christmas in London one year and in LA the next, as we love both cities. I have quite a lot of extended family in each, so we know that celebrating in either one will be very “happy families.” But it’s the run-ups to Christmas in each city that are quite different. In the US, everyone celebrates Thanksgiving, which comes at the end of November.

Friday

Cockburn

Cockburn will come to your Christmas party

Cockburn woke up bleary-eyed, splashed water on his face and took stock of his calendar this Black Friday. It is already filling up with events from embassies, magazines and cautious frenemies. He spent his Thanksgiving down South, practicing grounding techniques and avoiding stirring pots, except for the pot of cranberry sauce. It isn’t easy being Washington’s nosiest socialite – and even Cockburn needs to get away from the swamp once in a while. However, the time for wholesome family fun has ended. Your disoriented correspondent will be on a plane headed back to Reagan before all the decorations are up in the White House.

Thursday

Scott Jennings

My top 2024 takeaways by Scott Jennings, CNN’s ‘Black Sheep’

New York "Black Sheep.” Not a nickname I expected, but my friends and family get a kick out of the Daily Mail’s moniker for me following a series of viral CNN moments. It’s more accurate than “Lonely Scott,” which Bill Maher applied after watching our network’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. I am anything but lonely these days. In the wee hours following Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris, I impatiently wait my turn on CNN to explain what happened.

scott jennings

Friday

Cockburn

Wishing you a joyless and guilt-ridden Thanksgiving

Elsewhere in the world, they just call Thanksgiving “Thursday.” But in the addled minds of some on America’s progressive left, it’s something far worse. Joy Reid aired her “Thanksgiving message to MAGA trolls,” in which she discussed her “alternative” Thanksgiving idea for those who voted for Donald Trump: “Make your own dinner, MAGA, make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll among yourselves with Elon and leave us alone. You’ve got your heart’s desire: the president you dreamed of, and worship instead of Jesus.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Was Martha Stewart the OG trad wife?

Homemaker extraordinaire Martha Stewart has a fascinating new documentary about her life out on Netflix. The nearly two-hour film features narration from Martha herself about her childhood, her rise to fame, her marriage and the insider trading case that nearly destroyed her career. It’s worth a watch if you’re trying to get inspired ahead of your Thanksgiving celebrations tomorrow or if you just want to better understand the mindset of the perfection-driven television, magazine and homeware mogul. As I watched the documentary, though, I was mostly surprised at the parallels between the societal perception of Martha’s homemaking skills at the height or her popularity and the modern discourse about “tradwives.

Monday

Tim Rice

Go ahead, fight a little on the holidays

While most Americans kick off the holiday season with warm cider and festive sweaters, denizens of the commentariat have a more insufferable tradition. Each year, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, columnists everywhere bombard readers with condescending guides to fighting with “difficult” (read: Republican) relatives over the dinner table. Most of us simply roll our eyes or lampoon these unbearable screeds, while others call for civility. Writing for this publication earlier this month, Mary Katharine Ham made a refreshingly reasonable “case against the Thanksgiving dinner fight.” This is partially right.

thanksgiving fight
Alexander Larman

Why is there no great Thanksgiving movie?

In about a month’s time, one of the most boring conversations in social media discourse will begin (assuming Elon Musk hasn’t taken Twitter away from us out of pique). "X is a Christmas film." "X is not a Christmas film." And so on, as keyboard warriors angrily debate whether the eclectic likes of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Love, Actually qualify for this designation, as purists claim on endless Reddit threads that a Christmas movie can only be so-called if the plot and events are entirely driven by the festive season itself. Even for those of us who would argue that Die Hard and It’s A Wonderful Life make the perfect Christmas double bill — wider designations of the term be damned — there is considerably less debate as to what makes a Thanksgiving film.

Monday

The Spectator

Biden is the real turkey this Thanksgiving

President Joe Biden participated in the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon from the White House on Monday, appearing for fewer than ten minutes for what should have been a gravy — or, perhaps, easy as pie — public event. Instead, the brief appearance reminded us all of what we already know: Biden is not capable of handling the basic duties required to be president and would probably be better served handing out smiley face stickers to Walmart shoppers. Coincidentally, today’s pardon took place on Biden’s eighty-first birthday. White House staff were apparently eager to get ahead of chatter about the president’s age and included several jokes about it in his script.

Friday

Mary Katharine Ham

The case against the Thanksgiving dinner fight

As we come upon the treacherous holiday season before a presidential election, there will be plenty of people in media who tell you it is your moral responsibility to ruin food and fellowship with political confrontations. Armed with the emotional IQ of one of those idiots tossing perfectly good soup on the Mona Lisa — an ineffectual waste of vittles and dignity — these columnists insist that you must not let Aunt Margie’s incorrect opinions stand, lest democracy die in the darkness of her benighted worldview. You must serve countervailing takes as hot as the mashed potatoes, no matter the cost to family comity. It doesn’t have to be this way. There was a time, not too long ago, when we didn’t have to turn every breaking of bread into a struggle session.

family
corn
Timothy Jacobson

In praise of corn, a Thanksgiving essential

The Indians, as we innocently called them in the days of my youth, put their name to it: “Indian Corn.” Somehow, “Native American” or “First Peoples Corn” just doesn’t do it, so here let us observe this now-verboten usage. Technically, Indian Corn (known as calico or dent corn too, for its coloration and dents in the kernels) is one variety of maize, first cultivated, they say, in Mexico thousands of years ago. Columbus, who called the natives “Indians” because he was looking for India, brought back seeds to Europe in the 1490s; they did not take. The Plymouth colonists in the 1620s, from whose early travails the American feast of Thanksgiving emerged, grew Indian corn courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe. It no doubt helped them survive when the English peas ran out.

thanksgiving
Mary Kate Skehan

A one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving

Our first Thanksgiving together, my now-husband, then-medical-resident-boyfriend worked a shift during the family feast. I made it up to him with Melissa Clark’s one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving for two. The recipe went off flawlessly and made the constraints of my tiny apartment kitchen feel more like a game-show challenge than a life-or-death struggle. Clark’s 2022 cookbook Dinner in One makes the same promise about 100 different meals. The game-show, can-it-be-done? energy made the Thanksgiving method fun, but could feel tedious on a Tuesday night. Is “one-pot” a theme or a gimmick? Does this constraint serve the cook and the recipe, or is it arbitrary, artificial and unnecessarily limiting?

Thursday

Ben Domenech

An errand into the wilderness

Four hundred and two years ago this month, a group of courageous Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic on a ship seasoned from years of service in the English Channel. Their ship was the Mayflower. It bore a people with characteristics — bold, daring, foolish, devout — essential to the founding of a new nation that would become the envy of the world. The year was 1620. Europe was two years into a thirty-year religious war that would raze its cities, starve its citizens, unleash plagues and take kings. They set their backs to the old ways — and bet their lives and their families on America. What started in Plymouth changed the world — and changed it for the better.

pilgrims

Wednesday

Cockburn

Ron Klain ruins Thanksgiving

Top Twitter user Ron Klain is at it again. This time, the terminally online White House chief of staff tweeted out a list of talking points to bring up when your Uncle goes after Joe Biden at Thanksgiving dinner. Putting aside the fact that uncle should only be capitalized when it is being used as a proper noun, Cockburn is stunned at the daftness of the compilation. https://twitter.com/WHCOS/status/1595414110438662144 Klain claims that “gas prices are down by $1.35/gallon since June and inflation is moderating”, which while technically true, requires you to ignore the fact that gas prices were over $4.90/gallon in June. He uses the same laughable logic regarding inflation: it has "moderated" from a multiple-decade’s high of 9.1 percent in June to a still painful 7.

ron klain
Art Tavana

Thirty-five years of crying to Planes, Trains and Automobiles

No piece of art has ever affected me quite like John Candy’s face in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It has made me cry for thirty-five years, rivulets of tears. It has shown me that nothing evokes loneliness like a face. John Candy's face simultaneously reveals warmth and fatalism (it's the face of a man who always feared he'd die young — and did). His unibrow is childlike and genuine. His smile is never fake. But Candy’s shower curtain ring peddler Del Griffith is smiling through pain. He’s hiding behind the mask of a gregarious family man and "best in the world" salesman (with a bowtie and bristly mustache). His smile hides a secret: Del Griffith is a grieving widower, and his home is inside an old trunk he carries around like luggage.

Wednesday

Calla Jones Corner

Talking turkey with William F. Buckley Jr. on Quemoy

Sixty years ago, as a college student, I spent Thanksgiving on the island  of Quemoy off Formosa (as Taiwan was still called) eating Taiwanese turkey with Taiwanese generals, William F.  Buckley, Jr.  and chopsticks. Present-day college students — or even their parents — may not have heard of Quemoy — or its twin island, Matsu — until now. Or even Buckley, the highly articulate founder of modern conservatism, for that matter. Xi Jinping has been taking a hard and measured look at President Biden and our Department of State since last March when the Chinese Communist Party had Andrew Blinken and Jake Sullivan all but kowtowing to the CCP’s foreign affairs chief, Yang Jiechi, at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska.

quemoy
nazarian iran thanks
Sheila Nazarian

Giving thanks in the Land of the Free

Thirty-six years ago, I stepped off a plane and planted my feet firmly on American soil. It’s that day that my mind drifts to as my family of surgeons bickers over who exhibits the most precision in turkey-carving. My journey to the United States was not easy. I was born in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution. Soon after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, his regime rendered the Jews of Iran powerless. Much of what my family had owned was taken from us. After our home was seized, my parents understood that we had to flee, but the authoritarian rulers restricted our movement. This was in 1985 and the Iran-Iraq war raged throughout the country.

thanksgiving
Mary Kate Skehan

Thanksgiving with my illegally large family

If your family is like mine, you’ve spent the time and energy normally reserved for dividing up Thanksgiving potluck assignments determining how many people may attend your holiday, and under what public-safety conditions. The truth is, some families’ scaled-back Thanksgivings this year may actually mark an improvement on the traditional meal. We all know that turkeys are bland and fussy to prepare, one reason we don’t eat them all year round. (My father has a more gruesome objection involving the perceived similarity of turkey and human flesh, which I generally prefer not to consider.) Melissa Clark’s bacon-wrapped turkey breast is surely an enormous improvement.

Friday

Grace Curley

The supply chain crisis that stole Christmas

Who knew our relationship with China would be responsible for ruining not one but two Christmases? At least this year we had a bit of warning. Our own vice president told us of the current supply chain issues back in August. While most Americans were worried about President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Singapore discussing a different topic altogether. “The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months.” For once, Kamala was correct. Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, Americans had very different concerns.

supply chain

Monday

Calla Jones Corner

Mums the word

In early October I bought three chrysanthemum plants to brighten my front doorstep during the gloomy days here in Montecito, California. The outdoor plant stand at Trader Joe’s, overflowing with a panoply of colored mums, reminded me how I love seeing French flair flourish when decorating with these seasonal blossoms. How, for a decade, I’ve been sharing and creating recipes with my daughter, a wine executive, with chrysanthemum flowers from her local organic épicerie and leaves discovered in a Burgundian marché. In Burgundy, as in the rest of France, mums are displayed for Toussaint (All Saints’ Day) on November 1, and for Armistice Day, to mark the end of World War One.

chrysanthemum
wines
Roger Kimball

Two modest but delightful wines

According to Tennyson, ‘in the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’. Be that as it trochee, in the autumn a man of any legal age abandons rosé and moves on to Cabernet. If he is broadminded, he also makes a spot in his heart for Chablis, which I’ll come to in a moment. First, some anthropological, or perhaps I mean ethological, news. A friend recently passed along a slender but improving book called Wine: the Source of Civilization. Written by John J. Mahoney, a ‘certified wine educator’, it is full of edifying revelations. Right at the beginning, we have this bulletin: ‘Man did not settle from nomadic travels to build cities and civilization, and then develop wine.