Being Thankful Again

We held our tongue. We bit our lip. We gave our thanks. We ate, cleaned up, and parted ways. The Now-Normal seems so socially separated, simply sitting next to one another is an accomplishment.

We gathered in gratitude. We expressed love to one another. We said grace, broke bread, ate cheese and pickle-cups, scarfed down deviled eggs, and made too much food. The Focus on Food and Potluck Preparation rebuilt lost trust and invited inclusion. Everyone participated and chipped in for the cause. The family won.

Consuming all of it was completely out for the question. But we did run out of turkey and had beef left over? Curious to me. Next year I’m getting a John Madden Turkey because I got no leg! Seventeen family members all in on one mission and making it happen. Hope for the future is easy in those moments.

Making Thanksgiving Dinner the best since it stopped being so good some time ago was my goal. Lots of things in life are easy to point to that create division among us, but bridging those divides requires so much work that blowing them up is way easier. Why not change course? To share time and exchange gratitude.

Compass Star Wordsmith is where I keep writing about the small, stubborn acts (food, fire, family, showing up) that refuse to let the story end in fracture.

Join me. Once or twice a month, quiet words about ordinary hope, delivered warm.

Subscribe. The table always has room for one more chair.

We’re not blood in the old sense: three generations of moms and dads, sons and daughters, cousins by marriage, plus-ones, step-siblings, chosen family and friends. Traditions are thin on the ground. So on Thanksgiving Day itself we solved it the way the first one was solved: potluck.

Everything scratch-made at home, everyone brings something, everyone eats something they didn’t cook. The menu is the treaty. The divides are still there; we just agreed, for one afternoon, to step over them with plates in our hands. Simple. Undramatic. Effective.

Seventeen of us walked through the door Thursday morning carrying foil-covered dishes and the same quiet caution we’ve carried since about 2015. Some hadn’t shared a room in years. Some stay in touch only when someone dies. We didn’t pretend the cracks had closed. We just set the food down and started uncovering pans.

The table filled itself. Charcuterie, deviled eggs, baked Brie, pickle cups, brisket, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green-bean casserole, cranberry sauce, sweet-potato casserole, pies. Nothing came from a store tray. Everything carried someone’s fingerprints and someone else’s childhood in its steam.

We said a short grace (nobody grandstanding) and started passing.

That was it.

The usual sounds: a serving spoon against glass, a plate sliding hand to hand, the small “thank you” that still comes naturally when someone notices your dry potatoes and passes the gravy. There were silences, but they weren’t sharp. They were the kind you can chew in. Someone laughed too loud and nobody hushed them. A question that could have landed wrong was answered soft. A cousin who normally bolts early stayed to wipe down the table.

Nothing got solved. Nothing needed solving that day.

The disagreements are still there: the votes, the posts, the years we spent practicing distance. They’ll be waiting tomorrow. But on this Thursday we proved something smaller and more usable: we can still share one table without the roof caving in. We can still feed each other without keeping score. We can look across a dish someone spent all morning making and see a person, not a platform.

That’s the hope I’m taking forward.

Not that we’ll all agree someday.
Not that the cracks will disappear.
Just that we did this once, on purpose, and it worked. Seventeen people with plenty of reasons to stay home chose to show up, cook from scratch, eat together, wash dishes together, and leave with leftovers and lighter hearts.

If we can do it once, we can do it again.

Next year there will be new faces, maybe a couple of empty chairs, the usual flare-ups in the group chat come spring. But in November we’ll send the same text: “You’re on a side this year. Bring enough for twenty.” And people will reply with a thumbs-up because bringing something you made with your own hands is still easier than fixing each other, and easier is enough.

That’s the quiet hope: not a dramatic healing, just a repeatable afternoon.

A table that stays open.
A menu that still works as a truce.
A day when being family is something we keep doing instead of something we argue about.

We don’t have to fix the world. We just have to keep passing the plates.

If seventeen semi-strange, quasi-separated, always-connected family-members in one house on an ordinary Thursday can pull that off, the future has room to breathe.

See you next November.

Ric