Thanksgiving: A Pep Talk

No, this isn’t my turkey, and no, this isn’t the post about dinner party meals that I was planning to write.   This is a pre-Thanksgiving pep talk.

The first Thanksgiving, as everyone who attended school in the USA has been taught, happened in 1621 and was a celebration by the Pilgrims with the Wampanoags of a successful harvest and the fact that they had survived their first winter in Plymouth.   

Nope.

Smarty-pants Mr. Herr said, “First American Thanksgiving.”

Pardon me while I savor this: Wrong!

What I didn’t know until I consulted Wikipedia was that this was not actually the first Thanksgiving, nor is it a uniquely North American (as a hockey mom, I know Canada celebrates Thanksgiving in October) celebration. 

The English tradition of days of Thanksgiving goes back to the English Reformation under Henry VIII. 

 The Church of England established special religious days of Thanksgiving which replaced the days of obligation observed by the Roman Catholic Church.   

As you might have figured out, the day was meant to thank God for the bounty He had provided. That’s who they were thanking, not department stores for Black Friday.

And the Puritans who settled Plymouth you know as the Pilgrims? 

Not the first American celebration, either. Jamestown held thanksgiving services as early as 1607 — 14 years before the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims had a better media rep.

Americans were a praying lot in those days and they were proclaiming Days of Thanksgiving right and left. Elias Boudinot and the Continental Congress proclaimed  Thanksgiving and George Washington in his first time set the date as November 26, 1789.

After that, people just started having their own DIY days until Abraham Lincoln, and it wasn’t officially on the fourth Thursday in November until 1942.

You know how I say on my reels, “And don’t give up?” You know who didn't give up?  Sarah Josefa Hale, an early 19th Century writer and editor, who lobbied four presidents to create a national day of giving thanks to the Almighty before convincing Abe to proclaim it a regular official day in 1863.

FDR enshrined the late November date into law. Thirteen years later, that other critical sign of Thanksgiving, NFL games on TV, was born. Incidentally, the Bears beat the Lions. 

What is uniquely American is that we’ve turned it into such an extravaganza!  

I always ask people about their Thanksgiving traditions.   Some of my favorites are from friends who are new to the United States who embrace the traditional Thanksgiving meal because it honors their new country,  but then also prepare a traditional meal from their own country.  Think turkey with a side of kimchi or lasagna or curry!

The magazine articles, blog posts, TV cooking segments, recipes with tips and tricks start before Halloween. 

 The supermarket starts putting out the stuffing, and cans of pumpkin just after that.   It’s not an easy meal either.   What other meal do we ever eat has an expectation of at least six side dishes; stuffing (dressing if you’re southern), sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, braised onions, cranberries and a minimum of one vegetable.   Not to mention hors d'oeuvres, sometimes soup, salad, rolls and of course pies.  

If you’re a young cook or someone who doesn’t cook often it’s a terrifying prospect.   

You can spot these folks in the grocery the Tuesday before the big day, white-knuckling the shopping carts, flummoxed by the pearl onions, desperately looking at their shopping lists on their phones (or some even use paper!), panic written all over their faces.

Rule One: Relax. 

 Rule Two: Stay within yourself (I love that sports cliche).

Don’t try to do too much. Your table isn’t a Pinterest site.

These days there are all of the Instagram posts of tablescapes with gorgeous cornucopia centerpieces,  elegantly folded napkins, and glittering china.   

Don’t believe the hype. Try your best. In the worst case, open another bottle of wine, bourbon, or beer, and serve the pies.

Here’s a confession: I don’t like turkey that much.

Here’s a fact: I’d face an insurrection if I didn’t cook it.

When I was growing up we went to my Aunt Fritzy’s house for Thanksgiving and I was blissfully unaware of all of the work that went into it.  To the best of my knowledge my mother never cooked a turkey.  When we stopped going to my Aunt’s house (a long messy family tale for another day) when I was in college, we stopped having Thanksgiving.   

I cooked my first Thanksgiving in November of 1987.  Mr.  Herr and I hosted his siblings at our house in Lambertville.  I don’t really remember anything other than worrying about whether the Butterball turkey had thawed.   I’ve hosted it most years since.

I love to cook and even I find Thanksgiving a bit stressful.   37 years in I’ve got it down to a pretty strict timeline and I’ve also learned it’s ok to not make everything myself.   My oldest daughter makes the Green Bean Casserole, my younger daughter frequently makes the starters and I buy the pies.   

Please don’t gasp.

My oldest son makes the cranberries (which really means he opens the cans of Ocean Spray).  My one tip for this year, splurge on the fresh turkey, it’s tastier and you don’t have to worry about it defrosting in time.

The other big tip, if you don’t have time, or you don’t love to cook, buy the sides.   Almost every supermarket has ready-made mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes.  Really, buy the pies.  No one’s grading you.

Every year, Mr. Herr suggests we just go to a restaurant for Thanksgiving.

Heresy, I say.

We have our tradition and the Herrnation has more traditions than the House of Commons or Tevye.

Thanksgiving will be held at my house.

The important thing is to not panic, to make your own traditions, to enjoy your family, and to give thanks.

And of course, don’t quit.   

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Well Informed Guide to Throwing a Dinner Party

When I was growing up my mother gave frequent dinner parties for 6 to 8 people which is a size that fits comfortably at the dining table and allows for a free flow of conversation.  What I realized as an adult was that no one was coming for the great food.   My mother was, at best, a serviceable cook, but the wine flowed, the china and silver sparkled in the candlelight and she would get out my great grandmother’s beautiful art deco napkins. 

I love to throw dinner parties and I probably throw a dinner party a quarter. I just hosted a party for six the other day, 

Over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of women, young, old, successful, confident women start falling apart at the idea of throwing a dinner party. One second, they’re about to send the invites and next thing you’re knowing they’re making reservations somewhere. 

Don’t. Give. Up. 

I think I am a pretty good cook, but what I realized as an adult was that no one was coming for the great food.   

I learned that everyone likes to go out with friends and have someone else provide the food.   As a friend once said to me when our children were little “Even a tuna salad sandwich is fabulous when someone else makes it!”

I gave my first dinner party my junior year in college.  I was 19 and I lived with three other young women in a dorm apartment with a kitchenette.   

We, somehow, made homemade lasagna, fresh bread and a big Caesar salad and invited a bunch of our friends.   Not sure how we did it in that tiny kitchen, but everyone had fun.   

So, Lesson One: 

The important thing to remember when throwing a dinner party is that your friends are happy to have a night out.   And They Are Your Friends!  Axios just wrote a piece about throwing dinner parties.   

We're hanging out less. There's been a decades-long decline in face-to-face socializing — and it was only exacerbated by the pandemic.

It’s a rallying cry.  

Throw a dinner party!  

If you don’t have time to cook, you could do a take out Chinese buffet.   Use all of those serving dishes you got as wedding gifts and let people serve themselves.   Or, you could make a big green salad and serve takeout pizza.   Even pizza or take out Chinese feels like a party if you serve it on good dishes with real silver and cloth napkins.   Here’s a secret, champagne is fabulous with Chinese food!

That leads to Lesson Two: 

These People Are Your Friends! They are predisposed to enjoy the evening.

It’s a rallying cry.  Throw a dinner party!  

Get out your good china and cloth napkins! 

Lay in the beer, wine, spirits and champagne! 

Unless the only people you know are drones, you have a recipe for success. 

If you don’t have time to cook, you could do a take out Chinese buffet.   Use all of those serving dishes you got as wedding gifts and let people serve themselves.   

Here’s a secret, champagne is fabulous with Chinese food!

 I’m a big believer that nice things are meant to be used.   I use my sterling flatware every day and I run it through the dishwasher.   I figured out a few years ago that I only used the plates from my fine china, so I packed up all the teacups, saucers and strange little dishes I never used and put them in the basement.   This is how I store my china and serving dishes:

This is an old closet in my dining room which we used as a pantry when our children were little before we built the new kitchen.  I also have a couple of sideboards that I use:

Now remember, this is 40 years of collecting and also the accumulation as a result of being the only child of an only child of an only girl in a family who were interior decorators.  You don’t need all of this to have friends over.  And, as you can see, I don’t have any fancy storage containers.   If you have something that’s particularly delicate, you can put sheets of paper towel between the plates.   

The important thing is to keep your things where you can get to them easily.   If getting it out is too difficult, you will never use it!  

If you don’t have dishes, and want them, they’re pretty easy to buy these days.   I got a lot of mine on Ebay.  Etsy is also a great resource,  as are your local resale shops or flea markets.   For my last big party(60 guests) instead of buying plastic plates and flatware I bought a bunch of 7-8” plates and silver plated flatware on  eBay to augment what I already had.  They are the perfect for a buffet, reusable and I run them through the dishwasher. After a couple parties I’m ahead on the purchase price and I’m not sending bags of trash to the landfill.

Here are some of my plates:

There’s nothing wrong with mixing patterns.   In fact, I think a mix is more fun.    

Next week I’ll share  my go-to desert recipe for brownies and one of my main courses, lasagna.  I like things I can make ahead so I can spend my time enjoying myself with my friends!

Following that I’ll be sharing more recipes and more dinner party tricks: how to plan the menu, how to get the right guest mix so no one sits next to a drone, who to invite, how to place people for maximum good conversation.

As we get deeper into November, I’ll tackle the ultimate white knuckler of a dinner party: Thanksgiving(sadly, you don’t get much wiggle room on the guest list for Thanksgiving)

Here’s a hint: Thanksgiving really is easier than it looks. And, you get to show off that new china and silverware you just got on ebay. 

A couple of years ago, Mr. Herr decided we needed to get bikes for the lake and ride them as an alternative to walking every day.

On one hand, they’re right: riding a bike is like riding a bike, you don’t forget how.

On the other hand, is that fearlessness you had at 19 can easily evaporate by the time you’re 60. 

Mr. Herr and I got on those bikes and rode. We call it “Conquering your fears.”

Conquering your fears is just another way of saying, “Don’t give up!”

I’m riding bikes and cooking and throwing parties. You should too! 

A Well Informed Guide to My Closet

Several of you asked me for a tour of my closet. My first thought was I would do just a short reel and then post it.

Unlike Carrie Bradshaw’s dream closet, my closet is much less impressive -- then again Carrie’s closet didn’t have a happy ending and I’ve been married for 36 years and we still like each other. Most days. 

When Mr. Herr and I met, I was living in one of those great Philadelphia apartment buildings built before World War II. It was more than I could afford, but it had 12 foot ceilings and oodles of closets. Lots of closets. 

I had a walk-in closet in my bedroom and another large closet in the hallway.  Did I mention this place was closet Heaven?

That was 1987. It wasn’t until 2014 -- 27 years later – that I finally came close to that kind of closet space again.   

When we married, our first house in Lambertville was a nineteenth century brick townhouse built before the Civil War. If you know anything about houses from that era, they didn’t have a lot of closets (mostly because they didn’t have a lot of store-bought clothes). 

113 North Clinton had one closet which we shared. We also had an armoire in the guest bedroom.  I was very brave, sharing one closet with my husband. I’m not even sure how I managed. 

Our next house in Hopewell, did have more closets, one in each of the three bedrooms. 

They weren’t big closets; in 1910 when the house was built, Americans still didn’t have the wardrobes they do now, but there were three closets and our children were very small – four under the age of six. Pure chaos. 

I wasn’t close to Carrie Bradshaw, but I had enough clothing to make me be smart about how I managed my clothes, the kids’ clothes and Mr. Herr’s clothes. In those days, men still wore suits to work, so I faced closet competition from a lot of grey, blue, and grey and blue pinstripe suits (the man has a big color palette. Not).

Hopewell forced me to invent my closet system. That house had a walk up attic and one of my solutions was to keep all of our off-season clothes up there. 

Then we moved to the Money Pit in 1997, also known as the place I live in today. 

That house started out in the 1820s as a three bedroom farmhouse.  The Money Pit is worth at least one post all by itself, but for now what you need to know is even though we’d stepped up to four closets, two of them were shallow and not designed for modern clothing or hangers.  It was back to the attic for my off-season clothing. 

The attic was something out of the Halloween movie franchise, poorly lit, ceilings so low even I had to stoop and protruding nails which I regularly ran into.  The kids were bigger and had real clothing now, so we had six bona fide people living in this under-closeted house. The armoire from Lambertvlle had traveled to the new house and I imported two sets of steel shelves.  Think Home Depot meets French Imperial in a too-small bedroom with more doors than in Noises Off.   Here are a couple of photos of our old bedroom.

Paradise by the Closet Light was to arrive in 2014, when we finally added on.

Time for a quick digression. We moved to the house because it was in a town with great public schools, Princeton, and we could afford it. The house was also 1000 feet from the private school rink where our kids played hockey. Win-win, right?

We weren’t afraid of an old house – this was our third – what could go wrong?

In a word, virtually everything. The Money Pit doesn’t do it justice. Think the Money pit meets Green Acres.

Then our kids started getting into expensive private schools. The addition – and the promise of a bounty of closetage – was like one of those desert mirages of oases. Every time I thought I was close, it turned out to be just that, a mirage. 

The happy day finally came 15 years later than we had planned(who knew that educating 4 children would be soooo expensive– not us; we were young and still had theories).

My dream closet was a huge walk-in closet for me and a smaller regular closet for Mr. Herr. 

When Mr.  Herr saw the plans, he pointed out that the closet was as big as the bedroom and put his foot down.  He doesn’t do that often and he pointed out that our adult children, with apartments of their own, wouldn’t need the closets in their bedrooms. 

I still got a walk-in, but it was no longer going to be bigger than a Manhattan studio. It’s a healthy-sized closet. 

The problem is, like traffic when they build new highway lanes, my clothing always seems to exceed the available closet space.

For this I blame (but not too much because I love the clothes), Mr. Herr, who sees things and decides I need them and buys them. You can’t get mad at a man who knows every one of your sizes, even your glove size.   I also was taught by my mother and grandmother the importance of buying clothing that is high quality and timeless.   I have clothing I’ve owned for over 30 years.  About 20 years ago my daughters started shopping in my closet.   The best example of this is a Laura Ashley dress that I bought for New Year’s Eve 1988 which my younger daughter wore for Winter Formal in 2011.

Unfortunately, because we were a long way from smartphones in 1988, I don’t have a picture of myself in this dress. The twice a year switch is also a great opportunity to review my clothes.  What did I wear this season, what didn’t I wear?  Is it time for me to say goodbye to something?  I know that the official rule is “if you haven’t worn it in the last 12 months, it should go”, but I don’t agree.   I try to buy clothing that is timeless, so even if I didn't wear it this season because the right occasion didn’t come along, that doesn’t mean I won’t wear it next year.  Sometimes, I find that I have two things that are similar, then I’ll pass one on to one of my daughters.  Things that I think won’t work for any of us I either donate or sell.  

I also keep my hanging clothing sorted by type, dresses together, pants together, etc and then sorted by color.  It makes it easier to find things and to put outfits together.  I keep cocktail dresses and gowns together in a closet upstairs.  

And I do have a second closet, just outside the bedroom, the Narnia Closet, where I keep my coats.   We’ll talk about coats another day.

For the overflow, I’m back to the seasonal rotation system. I don’t have to go to the dreaded attic. The kids’ have moved most of their clothing to their own apartments (although my sons still have way too much stuff here) so now my rotation is more humane. 

Forget springing forward and falling back. Mr. Herr knows the seasons are changing when the summer clothing goes to the upstairs bedroom closets and the winter clothing comes downstairs and vice versa. 

Here are some pictures of the switch in progress.

Here is my downstairs closet midway through the process.

Here is the closet after the switch!

The shirts and pants on the upper rack in the first photo are Mr. Herr’s.   I keep all but one of his suits in one of the upstairs closets.  I switch his sport coats when I switch my clothes, otherwise Mr. Herr, who doesn’t pay much attention to his clothes, would be in danger of wearing Harris Tweed in June or Madras in January!  You can also see my trusty steamer.   A good steamer is absolutely worth the investment.

I keep my sweaters, belts, scarves and shawls in plastic boxes sorted by color and type.  This helps make it easier to get dressed in the morning and prevents moths.  I keep Lavender Sachets in the tubs as a further preventative.