In or Out? A Thanksgiving Dilemma

Are restaurants OK for our biggest eat-in holiday? One writer will be spending this Thanksgiving eating in—but thinks back fondly on a restaurant meal.

By Rebecca Schoenkopf for MSN City Guides

I do not love Thanksgiving.

It is only slightly more fun than Easter, and Easter commemorates someone dying for our sins. And it’s still less fun than Memorial Day, which also commemorates folks a-dyin’, but at least you get a picnic. There are no presents, the power plays are immiserating (if the parents are unable to host, Thanksgiving is always—always!—held at the home of the most-together daughter, who is anal and Type A and loves to lord it over the rest), and turkey may be the least delicious of all God’s animals with the possible exception of sea urchin.

Also, it’s the last remaining completely sexist holiday, and you will see it with your own disbelieving eyes when the mother you always thought was a good feminist calls the girls to hand-wash 17 greasy pots and platters and china for 12 while the men sit with their pants elegantly undone.

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The workload for Thanksgiving—as all the women reading this know, and the men don’t understand—is staggering. The only time I threw the party, when my mom ceded it to me as the newly grown-up daughter living with her boyfriend at 23, I went and went for a good four hours, until all of a sudden both my brain and body were wilted and done and I stood staring in my kitchen in a fugue state. I was snapped back to the cranberries only by my mother, who saw the dilemma with a glance and drill-sergeanted a command to me, her temporarily addled daughter. Tough love.

The dinner was fine. Whatever. It’s still turkey. And then I got to wash up.

Who eats out at Thanksgiving?
We had always mocked (perhaps even pitied) the slovenly, lazy moneyed who would buy their way out of domestic bliss with a hearthless dinner in a soulless restaurant, sort of like how the Hiltons always live in hotels. Look! See Tiffani scowl with loathing despite her quarterly allowance riding on her and Mummy’s continued détente? See Brent assess the waitress with the practiced leer of the date rapist? See Daddy … no, of course not. Daddy had a meeting (with his secretary). And “Uncle” Rick is here to preside in his place.

A restaurant Thanksgiving meant defeat: poor rich people! So unloved, and unloving!