It was the prospect of the leftovers that made Covid Thanksgiving feel more somber and more imminent to 23-year-old Ariel Murphy. Chief among her concerns: What to do with all that extra turkey?
The Montpelier resident sought help from her neighbors on Front Porch Forum. “Does the thought of only buying a single turkey breast to ‘celebrate’ fill you with despair?” she wrote, asking for someone to split a bird.
Excess turkey was, it turned out, the concern du jour. Nearly a dozen people responded, some seeking half a bird, others confiding to her that they didn’t know how to cook a turkey.
Murphy played yenta, pairing families to split a turkey, and sharing YouTube video how-tos for those who need it. For a moment, “it really felt like I was part of a community,” said Murphy, who will spend the holiday with her girlfriend.
Such ‘community’ will be in short supply this holiday’; Vermonters trimmed their traditional Thanksgiving plans after Covid cases spiked and Gov. Phil Scott banned inter-household gatherings earlier this month.
The internet has offered myriad how-tos about planning for a non-Thanksgiving: How to cook a Ina Garten-approved micro-thanksgiving, how to prepare a turkey when your mom isn’t around to do it for you, how to be alone on Thanksgiving, even how to say “no” entirely to the celebration.
But internet listicles do little to negate the reality that, for many, the holiday will be permeated with a sense of loss. As Murphy put it: “It’s sad and it’ll be weird.”
Thanksgiving is defined by the very things that are impossible during a pandemic: large family gatherings with mountains of food and watching football together on the couch, as far-flung cousins all stick their fingers into the same cracker and cheese hors d’oeuvres plate.
Such rituals are the glue that holds society together, argued 19th-century sociologist Emile Durkheim. Shared values and traditions — of gratitude, faith, or a particular buttery mashed potato recipe — create a sense of solidarity. Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence” to describe the feeling of contagious, heightened energy during large celebrations.
The lack of such rituals lead to a sense of loss, said professor Alice Fothergill, a sociologist at the University of Vermont who researched children and families during Hurricane Katrina. Displaced families were separated from their relatives, and many had also lost the artifacts that create a sense of belonging, such as a tablecloth gifted by grandparents, or the family heirloom ornaments.
During natural disasters or lockdown, the sentiment is the same, Fothergill said: “The holidays couldn’t be the cherished thing they were meant to be.”
‘A taste of home’
Phil Nguyen, a 27-year-old grad student at UVM, will be spending the holiday alone. He’d ordinarily return to Southern California and share a meal with his mom’s eight siblings and 35 or 40 family members. His dad would cook a vat of Pho, a traditional Vietnamese soup, overnight for the occasion.
At first, Nguyen thought it might be a relief to avoid the chaos of the gathering; now he’ll miss it, he said. He’s hoping for a silver lining: The urgency of the moment may be enough to persuade his dad to part with his secret pho recipe to “give me a taste of home,” Nguyen said.
The pandemic is teaching us to embrace — or at least to cope with — solitude, said Virginia Thomas, a professor of psychology at Middlebury College who researches solitude and social media.
Americans value “a pretty extroverted social culture,” but neglect the inner life, she said. “This pandemic has pressed that tender spot. We’re not comfortable there.”
The difference between solitude and loneliness is typically determined by how we frame it, Thomas said. People describe being alone as a positive experience when it includes meaningful activities and the chance to “connect authentically” to ourselves.
That’s nearly impossible to achieve when we hold ourselves to the American cultural standard of a table laden with food and surrounded by family. “It’s going to be a year like no other. Let’s not try to replicate the usual things,” she said.
Delivering the requisites
The state has indeed tried to “message urgently” the need to cut down on the holidays, said Tracy Dolan, Vermont’s deputy health commissioner, in a Q&A with VTDigger earlier this month, in which Vermonters posed their various holiday conundrums for her approval.
Scott said he’d be away from his mother and adult daughter, whom he hasn’t seen for nearly a year. “I understand how hard it is to be asked to keep making sacrifices,” he said.
The potential for political and social conflict further complicate those decisions.
When Jane Deblasio walks her dog around her Rutland neighborhood, a sense of resentment bubbles up at the sight of neighborhood families opening their homes to grandkids and friends. She’ll spend Thanksgiving away from her 7-month-old grandson. She gets “weepy” just thinking about it, she said.
Deblasio’s husband offered to go live elsewhere temporarily so she could take advantage of a loophole in Vermont’s isolation rules: People who live alone can visit immediate family. Deblasio ultimately demurred. “The ones who follow the rules are being punished on Thanksgiving,” she said ruefully.
Fothergill said she found in her research that families do best when they reshape their celebrations during a disaster — especially when kids help create the new traditions.
Often, those holidays are imbued with an acknowledgement that the current challenges are temporary — the sense that ”we are not going to be here forever,” Fothergill said.
In an effort to reimagine past traditions, Thea Lewis, a 62-year-old Burlington resident, offered to deliver the Thanksgiving requisites to her adult children. One daughter asked for her gravy and sausage-mushroom stuffing; another couldn’t live without the roasted baby carrots with maple syrup.
Even without grandkids, or extra visitors filling the house, Lewis said she’ll still decorate her house with fall colors or bouquets of bittersweet. And she’ll still wake up early to cook, and pour herself coffee with a glass of wine on the side.
Lewis aspires to a holiday like the Christmas dinner scene in the movie “Cast Away,” with a table crowded with food and family, all blissfully ignorant of any disaster to come. That’s impossible for now, she said. But, “Boy, do we need that, to cling to the mood of that.”
Murphy, the Montpelier resident, said she plans to do her best to overcome the “somber” tone that undergirds the holiday. She and her girlfriend had also each determined the “must-haves” for the meal: she needed cranberry sauce out of a can with the ridges etched in the jelly; her partner required green bean casserole.
She had started infusing cranberry vodka for the occasion, she added. Their plan? “Eat lots of food, and be gluttonous and celebrate.”
