Passing The Torch
Carving Up New Thanksgiving Traditions
by Laura B. Randolph

I have two indelible memories of the first and only time I cooked the family Thanksgiving dinner. One is how truly awful the food tasted — the turkey was dry, the string beans irreparably mushy, the pumpkin pies store-bought. The other is of how my mother, along with all the other family elders, pretended not to notice.

If you knew my mother, and the other over-50 folks to whom I am related, you would know how significant this is. As a rule, they have no pity on the rest of us. They come from the old school that says the only way a daughter/son will learn to do something right is to be told when and how she/he has done it wrong.

So, last year, when they all sat down to dinner and not one of them so much as mentioned the paper plates, the mismatched stemware, and the everyday silver, I was certain their collective shock had rendered them speechless.

But when my mother — the family matriarch, the woman who has never set a holiday table that didn’t come straight out of the pages of House Beautiful (exquisite china, a white linen tablecloth, sterling flatware polished to a gleam that very morning) — surveyed the table and pronounced it “lovely,” I wasn’t just baffled, I was chilled to the bone. And it didn’t stop there. Calmly, coolly, as if she were saying, “Please pass the gravy,” my mother turned to my only male cousin, Tony, and asked him to carve the turkey. A hush fell over the table. No one moved.

Ignoring the paper plates is one thing. But asking my cousin to carve the turkey is like asking Milli Vanilli to sing the National Anthem. If my family has one sacred Thanksgiving tradition, it is that my uncle, Tony’s father, carves the bird. It is a task he always performs with great fanfare and anticipation and has never entrusted to anyone, not even the year his carving hand was in a cast because he’d cut his finger off with a saw. “Great idea,” my uncle said to my mother, as he passed his son the knife.

Who were these people? What had they done with my real family? What was happening here?

A rite of passage. That, I later came to realize, was the only explanation. That Thanksgiving, something was being passed on — from mother to daughter, from father to son, from one generation to the next. It was the reason behind my mother’s sudden and inexplicable announcement that she would no longer be preparing our traditional Thanksgiving feast. Now I see her decision was never about who cooked the bird. It was about pushing us from the nest.

My family elders, the keepers of our heritage, had deemed the time right to begin passing on the family legacy. They had decided it was time to tell us, their sons and daughters, that one day soon the responsibility of gathering the family together, of keeping it close, would be ours.

When my uncle passed his son the knife, he really was passing the torch and sending us all a message: the clock was ticking. Soon, it would be up to us to preserve the family traditions — my father’s oyster casserole, my aunts’ cobblers, my uncle’s skill with a knife — that have connected one generation to the next and, most importantly, provided the essential roots and rhythms of our lives.

And, in this way, we are talking about so much more than Thanksgiving and place settings and turkeys. We’re talking about traditions that have been passed on for thousands of years, in one form or another, updated and imprinted by each generation before being passed on to the next.

Something of our ancestors’ teachings still lives on in each of us and, if we continue to foster them, will live forever with a unifying force, a quiet power, that has taught us how to survive and flourish in a hostile world, how to seize new opportunities and make the most of whatever difficult situations we may face. That, my family elders knew, was the real value of the traditions they were passing on.

And it was only the beginning. With each passing year we, the next generation, will be charged with more and more responsibility so that we can move forward knowing what it takes to raise our own families, to be good mothers and good fathers, just like our own mothers and fathers.

And so, as this Thanksgiving approaches, I have come to understand that each of my family members knew his/her child intimately. Each of them knew that, if the transition were to be successful, the torch had to be passed slowly, carefully. Otherwise, when the day came when we, their children, were the elders, we wouldn’t know how to keep it lit or burning. And if the passage were too swift or too sudden, we might find it too hot — or too heavy — to hold.

It begins with Thanksgiving. Or at least it can. For me, that is no easy challenge. I have never felt at home in the kitchen, and my mother knows this. Until recently, the only thing I have ever made for dinner with any skill or flair is reservations. Unlike my mother’s culinary skill, my style of cooking can best be described as new wave. Better still, microwave. Fast food. Blink of the eye. Push of the button.

Until now, culinary skill was never important to me. Until now, however, I never understood that when my mother was in the kitchen, she wasn’t just making our dinner, she was making our memories; she wasn’t just blending spices, she was blending generations.

And so weeks before the holiday, I stand in her kitchen stirring and seasoning. “Take your time,” my mother tells me, showing me how to baste the turkey and knead the bread.

“Time isn’t the answer,” I say, stomping my foot the way I did when I was a child. No matter how many times I do it,

I tell her, it doesn’t taste like hers. “That’s what I used to say to your grandmother,” my mother says, tying her apron around me.