Thanksgiving, If You Can Keep It

A doorknob is threatening my Thanksgiving. A doorknob in Danbury, Conn. A freaking doorknob, people!

Let me explain.

My brother-in-law works at a chemical factory. (Not the one I used to work in for a few summers, but another one.) When the pandemic set in and the theory was that surfaces transmit the disease, the company invested in good cleaning and spot-testing. Late last week, a doorknob there tested positive for COVID-19. A second test was done. Confirmed. And it wasn’t just any doorknob, but the one almost every employee touches. This doesn’t mean the doorknob was necessarily a source of great danger — more that someone in the company likely brought the virus in with them recently, and because it was a common area, it was impossible to narrow down the potentially sick workers from the rest of the group.

And so the mandatory human testing began. But, there’s a catch. There is a major pre-holiday rush on COVID-19 tests, and so, we may not know the results until Friday.

Like a lot of you, we’re having a smaller-than-usual Thanksgiving this year; family members from a few households locally, coming together. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has discouraged everyone from traveling for Thanksgiving, and has technically limited all indoor gatherings to ten people.

If the doorknob holds back my brother-in-law and his wife, the only guests we’ll have are the vegan in-laws. I love them dearly. We have roughly the same risk tolerance. I already spent a weekend making turkey stock, and preparing for the big roast turkey.

The turkey is the best part of Thanksgiving. I get up early, butter it up, and coat it inside and out with paprika, salt, and pepper. I grate the lemon rind up and mix that with pressed garlic in the cavity, along with loads of rosemary and thyme, before stuffing it with cut-up onions and lemons. I slip a few sprigs of rosemary under the skin of the breast. I fill a large measuring cup with a mix of orange juice, white wine, and melted butter, drop a cheesecloth in it, and place that over the breast to keep it from cooking too fast while the rest of the bird comes to temperature. Depending on the size of the bird, I pull it out of the oven at about 145 degrees; it always rises to a safe temperature on the counter anyway. While it sits for an hour, at least. Longer if I can. I make a pan of gravy with stock I prepared the weekend before. And then I carve.

I’m evangelical about the roast turkey because it wins converts each year. People who say that they never liked the turkey until they had mine. And, with some pride, I let them know it’s my mother’s recipe.

If that doorknob is our downfall, we’ll be eating turkey sandwiches for a week. My wife has some Italians in her lineage. And so, there was going to be a platter of antipasta from the local deli. That deli has all the social-distance markers on the floor, and signs warning people that they must wear masks to enter. But their Thanksgiving catering menu does not even pretend to conform with the latest diktats from Albany. The smallest platters you can order feed ten to twelve, and the party sizes go up from there. It smells incredible in that place before every big holiday. It’s a joyful place.

Really, family is everything this year. I haven’t seen a co-worker outside of Zoom since March. I haven’t seen friends since summer. The kids wear masks to school, which I think is unnecessary, even objectionable. But they’ve needed their friends more than they need my interference on this matter.

Back on April 1, I wrote that this COVID-19 purgatory was no way to live. That we should try never to get used to it. Politicians and average people were becoming nastier and weirder, and accepting infringements on human life that were unthinkable. A British human-rights lawyer suggested Prime Minister Boris Johnson move Christmas to February.

She’s wrong, Christmas is not an arbitrary date. And although she has the debility of coming from a culture used to dictatorial interference in religion, the liturgical calendar is not subject to even the British parliament.

Thanksgiving falls where it does for its reasons too. Holidays and feasts are supposed to interrupt the then-current events. Even horrible ones, such as our pandemic and its restrictions. We celebrate by resting from work and feasting, because heaven is a banquet and a feast, a place where our labors have ceased. So today my prayers are for a phone call, delivering the news about that little snot-sample from my brother-in-law’s schnoz. I’d have him at the table even if he was dying of leprosy. But it would ease his conscience to be in the clear. And for that, we could give thanks.