I hosted our family's Thanksgiving feast yesterday. It's my favorite feast day - just food and company - no expectations of gifts or decorations beyond a handful of conkers and a bunch of flowers. Husband Tony and I bought vegetables at the UBC Farmer's Market to go with the locally raised, free-range turkey. Elka, my son Jim's girlfriend, made apple pie with windfall fruit from the neighbour's tree. Good, green, citizens of second milenium that we are!
Twelve of us sat down to eat: myself, my husband, my brother, four of our five children, their spouses and dates, our grandson and our adopted grandmother. It was the usual raucous affair with lots of laughter, chips of serious conversation, joking and teasing, and sizing up of the new dates. It was another in the series of family myth-making events. One of those "we always..." and "remember when..." events. the stuff of family history.
I remember when my grandmother presided over the table and wore the matriach's ring. Then it was my mother. I didn't come for anybody's company in particular, or for the turkey and the pie, I came for the comfort and security of feeling a member of the tribe.
Now it's my turn. I provide the space. I cook the food, load the table and fill the wine glasses. I'm the facilitator enabling the group to come together to create the magic of communion. It takes as much skill and practice as any strategic planning session. So what are the ingredients? Who participates is irrelevant, what we eat doesn't matter (although eating something does, I think). What does matter? What makes a family feast work well, or not?
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Good question madame: the ingredients of the family feast. A few thoughts…
One of the very most fundamental ingredients of the feast has to be time. The feast has to occur and occur again, and then again... without fail… reliably …until finally it becomes the ritual of 'we always' and 'remember when'.
And then there is the tribe that is feasting. What binds them together (at least a good quorum of them anyway) year after year a sufficient number of times for the feast and ritual to 'take'. Are they bound together by blood alone, or is it also important that they share a story about their bond, a story that distinguishes them from every other tribe in town. We are the people who … know how to cook, laugh at strangers, always resist change… what are the forces that pull those tribal atoms towards each other. (Raises the question of the non-feasts and the tribes for whom the strong force is repulsion, not attraction.)
And then the main ingredient. At the heart of every ritual feast there is one person (or a federation of a very few people, say for examples the sisters who pass the feast back and forth between their homes for 50 years) who is willing to carry the tribe, to organize the dinners over and over again, come inconvenience or influenza, and to mean it. To love the event and the participants in such a way that when the invitation or the summons shows up in our email, we know we are wanted at the table, we know that our presence is as fundamental to the feast as the largess of the larder…
Time, tribal affiliation, true appreciation… Some of the ingredients.
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