Before you celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, you MUST read this NYTimes piece -
By COREY MINTZ
NYTimes / November 26, 2013
TORONTO — In Canada, where I’m from, Thanksgiving is over
already. We celebrated on your Columbus Day, and if it offers any solace as you
grow increasingly (or maybe just a little bit) anxious in these final hours,
ours turned out fine.
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Katherine Streeter
We ate pretty much the same things you will cook tomorrow.
I’m sure your menu and your meal will be swell. But I am here to argue that it
matters less than you imagine.
Over the last few years, I’ve held 201 dinner parties for a
newspaper column up here (mine, actually) called Fed. I’ve learned that the
food is less important than the company and a little bit of graciousness. Call
it hospitality, or entertaining.
A generation of food television, with its ticking clocks and
well-lit close-ups, has brainwashed us into believing dinner is a competition.
Our manners have atrophied. We are now willing to put so much thought and
effort into what we eat — making cronuts at home, name-checking the latest hot
restaurants, leading a torch-and-pitchfork mob against gluten — that we’ve lost
our understanding of how to eat with people.
We have been reduced to a society of boors by stripping
dinner of joy in our attempts to reproduce complicated chef food in our homes.
If I were to offer Thanksgiving advice, it wouldn’t be about
what kind of bird to buy or which dessert to bake. It would be to remember that
you are hosting a version of a dinner party, and that the same etiquette —
taking your guests’ coats and getting them a drink, making them feel
comfortable, feeding them in a timely manner, serving food with confidence and
ending the evening on a high note — is just as appreciated by your family as by
anyone else you would bring to your table. Maybe more.
The focus should be on making your guests feel good.
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