Without question, my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. I relish the opportunity to appreciate all the wonderful things about life. I also love that it is simultaneously a holiday all about complaints, criticism and arguments. Every holiday should contain such multitudes. I might be feeling grateful for my blessings while also wishing the gravy had more salt in it. There’s something uniquely American about turning a holiday that’s meant to be a joyous celebration of abundance into a chance to vehemently disagree about something trivial.
Of course, I love arguing about trivial things. In fact, that might be what I’m most grateful for. Thanksgiving traditions are fertile ground for arguments. What to eat and, even more crucially, when to eat. Every year, someone in your life – a family member, friend, know-it-all writer – will tell you they have settled the eternal debate about when to commence Thanksgiving dinner. Some (wrong) people think the word “dinner” should be taken literally, in the American sense. These strict constitutionalists can see no nuance in the holiday traditions and believe (falsely) that the meal should begin between 5pm and 7pm, when it’s properly dark outside.
My family took the opposite path. My mother would start cooking the meal the day before, then get up early to keep cooking the day of. As food would be finished, we’d be able to eat it as we pleased. All the while, the TV would be tuned to either a James Bond marathon or a football game. My brother and I could leave and go to the movies and come back whenever we wanted. Perhaps what my mom was most grateful for was her freedom from us.
Because of this lackadaisical approach, I have very few actual memories of Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, my mind wanders to the scene in Moonraker where the pigeon does a double take when James Bond rides a gondola through a piazza.
While my experience is perhaps a bit extreme, it was at least clear-eyed about the most crucial facet of Thanksgiving. It is likely to be the largest meal you will have all year – a meal loaded up with carbs, fat and sugar. Many of you will be combining this depravity with alcohol or the weed-smoking jaunt dubbed the “cousin walk”. Why would you want to put your body through this anywhere close to bedtime? And when you’re with your family, why would you want your bedtime to be after 10pm?
Those of us with evolved sensibilities, who aren’t beholden to literal readings of words like “dinner”, understand that the best time to start eating is 3pm. Let me walk you through it: eat a light breakfast, skip lunch, see a movie, and be back around 2.30pm at the latest. If you would rather stay in and watch football instead of the movie, resist the temptation to snack on cheese or whatever might be lying around the house while cooking is happening. If you’re the one cooking, that’s even better. Once 3pm rolls around, you’ll be starving. For the actual meal, you have full rights to eat as much as you want, because you now have hours to let your food digest, clean up, make small talk with relatives, and partake in all that other cheerful activity.
Imagine if you wait until 6pm or, God forbid, 7pm or 8pm to eat Thanksgiving dinner. This means you need a real breakfast. You have to eat a midday meal in between. If you don’t eat, because you don’t want to be full before a giant, heavy dinner, you’ll be pestering your parents (or getting pestered by your kids) about when the food will be ready. You’ll devolve into some kind of rabid animal, pacing back and forth and waiting for the carcass to be dumped on the table. Thanksgiving goes from a time to reflect to a sadistic game of seeing how long you can go without basic sustenance.
Thanksgiving is meant to be a grand occasion, a meal unlike any other in the calendar year. So why would we treat it like any other meal and slot it at night? I truly do think our culture has gotten hung up on the word “dinner”, which doesn’t even mean the same thing in every region of the United States. In some places, “dinner” is the word for “lunch”. Don’t ask me what “lunch” means there. Maybe that’s what they call a “cousin walk”.
This is why I think it’s time to retire the term “dinner” from our Thanksgiving lexicon. We simply call it the “Thanksgiving feast” and embrace that it is the one and only meal we are having that day. That it should come at a nice, convenient time during the day. And that you absolutely should not watch GoldenEye with your family because of this scene. Please, don’t make the same mistake as I did.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
