A Guide To The Greatest Thanksgiving Ever

Welcome to your guide to the greatest Thanksgiving ever, featuring a week of amazing football, starting with Chiefs-Rams (Chiefs-Rams!!!) on Nov.19. But first, Wright Thompson tackles the most important part of the holiday: the chance to be your best self.

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON I called up my local butcher in Oxford, Mississippi, and placed the same Thanksgiving order I place every year: four beef tenderloins, which is my contribution to the sprawling Thompson family gathering, as it was my father’s contribution before me. This year’s order was a bit melancholy because Wong’s Foodland in Clarksdale, the town where I was born, recently changed hands. They’d been the purveyors of the tenderloins for decades, but lacking time to check out the new owners— such a task cannot simply be trusted to unvetted people—I turned to my local LB’s Meat Market, which has yet to mess up any cow-related missions.

It’s that time of year again, perhaps the best part of Thanksgiving: the planning, the anticipating, the way people know and embrace their roles. There’s a family email chain going around as I write this story. Here’s the most recent exchange:

Leigh Thompson: If someone doesn’t volunteer for the remoulade, then I will be forced to attempt making it and I will not be responsible for the consequences!

Tempe Thompson (one minute later): I will make it!

Leigh Thompson: I knew that would work! hahahaha

I love the rituals of big family gatherings, which feel like a kind of secular Mass. And this changing of butchers, as with any alteration of the patterns of our family Thanksgiving, makes me stop to examine why we do the strange things we do. Why we are forever creating Communions and liturgies out of our holidays.