I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to maintain the nostalgic feeling of the holiday season when things look so completely foreign this year. Thanksgiving, for me, usually meant: waking up just in time to catch the tail-end of the Macy’s parade; kitchen smells indicating my mom’s actually-early call time; and if we weren’t inviting over 20+ guests , traveling to see them all.
While the gatherings have shrunk in size over the years , this year has whittled away at our core group even further. There’s a silver lining there, though: fewer people to host means more time to focus on the little details that get overlooked in favor of convenience and utility. Instead of huge, single-use trays heating over sterno, we can serve sides in carefully selected vessels, and in lieu of bringing out the folding chairs for extra seating, we can use the dining table as it was designed.
The prep work, too, will be more focused this year, since the stress of visitors piling into the house has subsided. I’m sure my mother will still whip us up into a company-is-coming frenzy, and I’m smiling just thinking about commiserating with my dad and brother over having to scrub the bathroom... for our three additional guests.
The checklist below is a way to channel the angst of this past year into something that feels wholly un-2020: preparing for a gathering, no matter how small. By no means do you need to do all, but in a way, it might feel comfortingly normal to cross them off one-by-one.
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