I've been writing my blog since about 2013-2014 and never written a post about celebrating Thanksgiving. Truthfully, my family treats Thanksgiving merely as a day when everyone actually has a day off to get together to eat. We do this at other times in the year (for example: Juneteenth) and Thanksgiving simply allows for another opportunity to gather. It's the holiday of colonizers and, as descendants of enslaved Africans, Thanksgiving doesn't resonate with us in the way that the holiday is highlighted in history textbooks. I should also note that I'm not a fan of Thanksgiving as a holiday in general, so take this as foreshadowing for the rest of this story.
With that being said, I finally convinced my family to break away from the "traditional" Thanksgiving meal after putting in 10 years of work to make this happen. My family in the past has always done a Cajun/Creole style meal and more recently throwing in barbecue to have a hint of Texas flare in the mix. We would even have dessert from a French-style pâtissière. However, cooking that much food for only a handful of people didn't seem logical and I began campaigning to eat Chinese food on Thanksgiving back in high school. They all agreed to it this year and we ordered takeout from one of our favorite Houston area restaurants - Tai Li, located in Atascocita off FM 1960. We ordered our food and picked it up the day before Thanksgiving because the restaurant was going to be closed the next day.
Thanksgiving Food of Past Years
The next morning, we woke up and watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the early NFL game, and the National Dog Show. We heated up our food for the day in the microwave and oven as needed and enjoyed our Chinese takeout which consisted of the following menu items:
House Special Fried Rice with beef
2 orders of regular House Special Fried Rice
3 orders of Egg Rolls (2 per order)
Steamed Dumplings
Lemon Chicken
Ma Po Tofu, Hunan Style with Pork
Beef with Garlic Sauce
With it only being myself, my mom, and my dad, we each went into the kitchen whenever we wanted and ate food leisurely -- as we would on any typical day. The weather was bad with all day rain in the forecast, so my grandma and aunt stayed at their house for the holiday to avoid inevitable Houston area flooding.
We didn't totally abandon our typical Thanksgiving food even though that was the initial plan. We maintained the Texas flare by also having some barbecue. My mom prepped the food and my dad cooked some ribs, sausage, and a turkey on the barbecue pit the night before Thanksgiving. The plan was to not cook anything, but the food was here, including a 14 pound turkey. At least the pies were store-bought!
2022 Thanksgiving Food
So what happens to all of that food when there's only 3 people around to eat it? We ate the some of the Chinese food for lunch and some of the barbecue for dinner. Much of the food was saved to eat throughout the rest of the week and to freeze for some of my future meals. We'll try the whole no cooking at all thing next year...or maybe do brunch for Thanksgiving. For now, I'm just happy that we're finally breaking away from tradition and ushering in a new style for ourselves that makes the week a little less stressful and tiresome!
Feel free to leave comments below, tweet (@KimiThoughts), or leave a post/message on Facebook (@KimisTravelThoughts) and share what you did for the week of Thanksgiving!
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