Nov 17, 2023 4 min read

My contribution to Thanksgiving dinner will be a tossed salad. At its most basic, that side dish requires a huge bowl, lettuce, tomatoes and vinaigrette dressing.

But because I won’t have to do any cooking or decorating this year, I’ll jazz things up a bit with three different greens and some colorful crunchy things. Maybe I’ll make the homemade croutons. After all, the most time consuming part of Thursday will be driving the salad and me to the family dinner.

My daughter, on the other hand: she’s got herself in a vortex of holiday anxiety. She’s 24 and wants everything to be perfect. Remember 24? Remember those first dinners – those holidays in your own nest and you want everything to be perfect?

She and her husband are newlyweds living on a military base in upstate New York. Because of work schedules, they won’t be making the trip home this week, an empty-nester reality that spun me into my own vortex of sadness. And so this week, I took a few of my vacation days and headed north and east for a visit.

“Friendsgiving,” she said as we had dinner at a place near the base Tuesday evening. “Four college friends are coming up.”

It will be a traditional turkey dinner. While her husband is frying the turkey out on the driveway, Grace will be making the rest of it: mashed potatoes and green bean casserole and stuffing.

“Grammy’s stuffing,” she said, and I reminded her of how much work that is. You let the bread get stale, you put it through a meat grinder along with the onions and walnuts, fry that all up in a skillet with butter, season it and then bake it in the oven.

“Meat grinder?”

“Maybe just buy Stove Top stuffing this year,” I told her.

After dinner, her nascent perfectionism was evident as we perused the aisles of Target for tabletop decor. As her handsome husband quietly followed us with the shopping cart, I pointed out options. I suggested the white tablecloth with little gold stars with a green plaid table runner shot through with golden thread, and gold napkins.

“Shouldn’t I get something red and green?” she asked. I stopped in mid eye roll and remembered that this was the child who wants Halloween to begin around the Fourth of July and Christmas to come before Halloween.

“You don’t have to crowd Thanksgiving,” I said, explaining that there’s a way to decorate to suggest Christmas without festooning the turkey with pine garland. “Christmas can wait its turn.”

As her husband nodded his approval, I gathered the white tablecloth and the green runner and the gold napkins and dropped them into the cart. But as a nod to her love of all things Santa Claus, I helped her pick out an apron with smiling reindeer all over it.

Can’t tell you how happy it made me to buy those things for them. I won’t be there for Thanksgiving, but I’ll be able to picture Grace in that apron, setting the table for her friends.

The next morning, as I packed up the car to return home, I pulled Grace aside.

“I want to tell you something,” I said. She looked worried.

“Try not to fret,” I said, my hands on her shoulders. “I know you want things to be perfect for your dinner. Something is not going to taste right, or turn out right or look right.”

She looked at me.

“It doesn’t matter. When your friends have left and you’re cleaning up, you will remember how much fun it was.”

“I know,” she said. “I just want everything to be perfect.”

I told her it will be perfect, no matter what.