As family members buzz across the country to join their relatives and our country grinds to a crawl with Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been asking people what long-standing traditions they practice as they gather around the table, perhaps something that had been passed down generation to generation and has now become part of their family rituals. One friend of mine told me that every year her family makes homemade noodles together and then puts them on top of their mashed potatoes at mealtime. I could make an argument for placing those two items in separate areas on my plate, but that is what defines tradition in their family. It’s part of this uniquely American gala called Thanksgiving, a time to rekindle what brings our nearest and dearest closer together, and in one case that means realizing that if noodles and mashed potatoes can get along on a plate for a couple of hours, everyone else can too. But also, I think it’s a time to exhibiting our gratefulness by revisiting our best table manners as we sit across from each other, thankful for all the blessings that have come our way in the past year.
If you were taking a course on table manners, and there was a final exam, it would be held on this holiday, Thanksgiving Day. While pencil and paper would not be present, passing the course would depend not on how well you crammed the night before, but how well you included the basic social graces your parents taught you, those simple rules of etiquette that score a lot of points on the final report at dinnertime. I won’t say I flunked the manners course as I was growing up, but my score wasn’t anything to brag about either.
One year, my brother and I decided to stage a contest at the table. We thought it would be fun to create volcanoes with our mashed potatoes, fill them up with gravy, carefully constructing a system of channels that allow the gravy to slowly leak out like lava onto the villages we had constructed with our other food. This would of course fall into the category of playing with our food, but we thought it was worth the risk to watch a natural disaster unfold on our dinner plate. As our game progressed and the gravy ran off into the landscape of our meal, the winner, whose volcanic ash reached the edge first and would yell out, “Please evacuate immediately! Grab your children and run for your lives!”
That attempt at establishing a yearly Bender volcano tradition died a quick death, followed by a moment of silence, and the loss of our TV privileges for the rest of our lives or until we turned twelve, whichever came first.
All seriousness aside, I was fortunate as a kid to have a grandmother living with us, and she loved to cook year-round, but especially at Thanksgiving. In fact, I still have all of her newspaper clippings and hand-written recipe cards stored in a huge plastic box for every kind of dish under the sun, most of which included a couple of sticks of butter in the list of ingredients. And as if adding a couple of pounds of butter weren’t enough, it was common practice at our table to have more butter readily available on the table and a chunk of it on your plate as backup in case you experienced a butter-low and bottomed out during the meal. Under those circumstances, and given what we know now about cholesterol, I don’t know how my grandmother lived to be ninety-four. There is some evidence that she didn’t, but actually died several times before from butter overdoses, once at 37 and once at 72, but was revived both times using a now antiquated technique referred to as marginal compressions.
Obviously, our family threw out the healthy eating rulebook when Thanksgiving rolled around and while it sounds cheesy, I believe our parents balanced out all that thick cooking with equal amounts of laughter and love, and naturally, large portions of manners. The reminders to behave at the table were often summed up in old-fashioned sayings, sayings that made little sense to me at the time, such as “If you wear a hat at the table, you’ll die in a stable.” Every time I heard that, I visualized a horrible accident where I fell off a haystack in a horse stable and impaled myself on a pitchfork, only to find myself looking up at my grandmother, who simply looked down at me and said, “I tried to tell you but you had to learn the hard way, didn’t you?”
Respectfully, many of those old rules for civility still hold court with my family today as we sit down for the meal and let those etiquette tips whisper in our ears. And notice I didn’t say “plopped down for the meal.” It seems that current tradition supports the notion of landing on your dinner seat as if tossed from an airplane, which would fall into the category of skydiving, not table manners. In order of succession, we were not allowed to sit down at all until my father, the breadwinner, was seated and after that, the women. That sitting order is a lost art now, falling by the wayside into a set of forgotten mores that made eating a civilized activity, where knives, for instance, were balanced across the back of the plate after each use, and not laid back down on the placemat between bites.
While a more rickety construction of cultural changes have bent many of the old rules on table decorum, I’m now glad for the mandatory class I enrolled in every time I came to the table and waited before taking my first bite until my father picked up his silverware. While I did not always adhere to all of the regulations, good manners created a language of gratefulness and were a silent way of recognizing all the goodness that was laid out before us. It meant that civility would rule, meaning that no one would have the power to turn the dinner gathering into some kind of big-time wrestling match where etiquette was thrown clear of the ring for a cheap laugh.
As I was on the receiving end of the teaching, mealtime could at times seem very stiff and formal, a lot of hoopla over nothing. Both my mother and father did a lot of correcting and redirecting that ultimately developed an appreciation in me for what it takes to bring a meal to the table. While I didn’t like being told nine times to get my elbows off the table, chew with my mouth closed, and put my napkin on my lap, over time I began to understand that if someone was taking time to do the grocery shopping, prepare the food and present it, the very least I could do was to bring my best manners to the table and leave any slovenly habits I’d developed somewhere else.
Perhaps you are part of a Thanksgiving meal that looks more like a Viking reunion – where licking your fingers is normal, and huge bites of turkey are stabbed as if it the turkey was still alive. Perhaps the blessing at your home, if said at all, sounds like “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.” However, by the time the sweat equity of cooking had poured itself into the marathon of overnight baking and broiling it was expected that we kids would try a bite of each type of food even if we didn’t like it, and not expect any seconds on our favorite dish until everyone had their first helping.
Did I like being corrected? No, but I see the pay off now as I mourn the loss of decency, replaced by people on their phones, reaching across the table for more food, and chasing their food around their plate with a knife as if it were dirt on a construction site. It makes me wonder how digestible their actions are when the meal is over and they go out into the world.
Manners, when we decide to bring them to the table, become the social glue that holds those tasty Thanksgiving casseroles together and demonstrate our gratefulness, good fortune and good bounty. As we lay our napkins on our laps and wait our turn for the favorite dish to come around the table, we avoid mocking the hard work that went into all the preparations. No doubt, you’ll get enough food this Thanksgiving, but your social graces and good manners will instill a silent but powerful message to those seated next to you of what thankfulness looks like and perhaps even establish some new traditions that will last longer than just one meal.
And one more thing…I would love to hear what table manner your parents instilled in you that held you in good stead as a grown-up. Send those gems to me and I’ll share them with my listeners next week on Knee Deep. There are some funny ones out there, and some that are written in stone, but regardless, send me the details! Until then, Happy Thanksgiving to you, my gracious fans, and I promise you this year, I’m going to refrain from making that mashed potato volcano. I don’t want to have to evacuate our family when the gravy spills over and overtakes the sweet potatoes.