Setting the Table at Thanksgiving

Family traditions are important, they help make us who we are. Here is the story of one of my family traditions.

(My house in Bedford Stuyvesant, this photo taken years after I moved. There have been changes, none for the better. I loved this place!!!! Photo: Property Shark)

When I was six years old and my brother was four, my parents made the decision to move from our small apartment in St. Albans, Queens to a big house in Gilbertsville, a picturesque village in upstate NY. Our apartment in St. Albans was the ground floor of what was once a modest one-family, 2 story house, probably built in the first quarter of the 20th century. It was now a two-family house. I remember that the bedroom my brother and I shared was originally the enclosed porch. That opened to our living room, and my parent’s bedroom was the original dining room. Behind that was the kitchen.

Our living room was also our dining room, although I don’t remember how that was set up. When my parents made the move, they had to put most of their furniture in storage while we transitioned from NYC to Gilbertsville. The house we moved to was filled with antique furniture the previous owners left behind. There were couches, bedroom sets, chairs and tables, all of it quite nice, most of which my parents eagerly used, as we moved from a four-room apartment to a fourteen room farm house.

But when they went to get their furniture from storage, the storage company told them that they made a mistake and somehow either lost or sold our furniture. To make up for it, they offered my parents a dining room set that they had on their hands that they couldn’t sell. It was too big for the average Queens apartment or house, but way too nice to simply trash. Since we were now in a much bigger house, and since our old dining room set was gone, my parents accepted the replacement, and it was trucked up to our new home. That’s how we got our baronial dining room set.

The style of the furniture was Jacobean, big pieces with with heavy legs and barley twist carvings. The set came with a table, six upholstered chairs, a large buffet table and a china cabinet. The furniture was probably from the very late 19th or early 20th century, an expensive, heavily carved and ornate group made to go into the popular “Banker’s Tudor” houses that were all the rage at that time in upscale suburban neighborhoods, many of which were in parts of Queens. Who knows, the furniture could have come from some grand estate. But it was ours now.

My mother set it up in our large dining room in our new house, it fit perfectly, the large room allowing more than enough space for all the pieces. The set was my mother’s most prized possession. For the next seventeen years, we used the dining room for Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years’ feasts. It was always a special occasion to set the table with a linen tablecloth, our finest dishes and glassware, and sit down to a fabulous meal in celebration of a holiday. When the table was not used for meals, my mother decorated it with a centerpiece of some kind, with candles, flowers or greenery arranged to be a beautiful entrance to our home, as the door we always used to enter the house opened into that room. When she hosted meetings or gatherings, the buffet and dining table were full of food and drink.

We moved from our house in Gilbertsville the year after I graduated from college. The dining room  furniture came back to NYC, this time to the Bronx. The apartment my mother rented was too small for the table, chairs and the buffet, but we had the china closet on display in the foyer of our 1930s-era apartment in the North Bronx. The rest of the set was in storage in the basement of the building. My mother and I shared this apartment for about two-and-a-half years.

We wanted to live in a house again and began looking at brownstones in Harlem and later in Bedford Stuyvesant. We would get the weekly issue of the Amsterdam News, which was the only source at the time for homes in black neighborhoods, and pick interesting ads and look at properties over the weekend. We moved to Bedford Stuyvesant in 1983. After many weekends of searching, my mother and I rented a small, three-and-a-half story brownstone on Jefferson Avenue, between Marcy and Tompkins avenues.

It was a rare house that still had all of  the original period details and had never been chopped up into apartments or boarding house rooms. The house was only two rooms deep, so both rooms on the parlor floor had high ceilings, marble fireplaces and a beautiful set of etched glass pocket doors that separated them. Over the years, both rooms took turns as our formal dining room as the furniture looked great in either one. It was fun to be able actually have room to move things around.

The big table could comfortably seat eight. Ensconced in our Bed Stuy home, my Mom and I would have Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with my brother and some of our friends who were far from home or had nowhere to go. We always had a full table. My mother was an excellent cook, and we always had enough food to feed an army. For Thanksgiving she would always cook a turkey with stuffing and a ham, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, a salad and another veggie, plus candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, fresh-baked rolls and pumpkin pie for dessert.

My mother passed away two years after we moved to Jefferson Avenue. The year that she died, and the year after that, I went to restaurants with friends for Thanksgiving. We always went to intimate, classy places with excellent meals, but it wasn’t the same as having Thanksgiving at home. After that I  decided to continue the tradition of inviting friends and having a huge Thanksgiving meal. I spent my entire life watching my mother cook, so I knew how to make every dish in just the same way she made them. My macaroni and cheese, which is her mac ‘n cheese, is still a big hit with my brother’s family, and with any of my friends who have had it.

One year I invited friends who were in theater and opera productions with me. Another year I had an entirely different group of friends. None of them had ever been to Bed Stuy. I gained a second family when I became close with my neighbors across the street. They became my “Aunt Joice and Uncle Milford” and shared the table with me and with my friend Deb from work, who had recently been divorced. She and her family also became my family. Sometimes my brother was there, sometimes he had Thanksgiving with his girlfriend’s family. She would become his wife, giving us both entry to yet another family group. Although I deeply missed my mother, I was blessed with wonderful friends and their extended families, so Thanksgiving was still a big family affair.

One memorable Thanksgiving several years after Mom’s passing, and when my brother was still single, I went all out. I had all my mother’s china, table linens and more. She had been an avid collector for years. These items were rather out of fashion and could be bought at thrift stores and neighborhood antique stores for really reasonable rates. Because she loved them, I had a good time using them, especially a beautiful linen tablecloth that I bought for her on my trip to Italy, when I was a junior in high school. I wanted to recreate as much as possible, my mother’s classic Thanksgiving table.

That year, the guests included my brother Mark, my close friend Debora, Uncle Milford and Aunt Joice and their daughter and son-in-law. I spend several days before Thanksgiving cleaning the house and preparing the food that could be made prior to that Thursday. I got up early on Thanksgiving day and prepped the turkey and put it in the oven. As everything was cooking, I set the table carefully. I put down a nondescript cotton tablecloth to protect the finish of the table. On top of that I placed the prized Italian linen tablecloth.

I set the table with our best dishes, a partial set my Mom had been gathering. There weren’t enough dinner plates in that pattern, so I ended up mixing and matching with another set. The thin, fine porcelain plates were the best dishes we had, and had been our Thanksgiving dishes since the Gilbertsville days. Mom had collected pieces a bit at a time, and was always on the lookout for more, as we only had five dinner plates. (They are still impossible to find.)

I set out the crystal glassware, also antique shop finds, mixed with a set of delicate water glasses found in our Bed Stuy house and rescued from harm. I pulled out all our serving dishes, our good silverplate and our candlesticks. The table looked wonderful, the silver was gleaming, the crystal had lights refracting from the surfaces and the lit tapers, and everything looked just perfect. We brought up all the food dishes from the kitchen and used the buffet to hold them before putting everything on the table. The finest tables in the land weren’t any better than this.

Everyone sat down and I placed the large turkey on our family turkey platter, another old tradition, and placed it on the table in front of my brother. As the man in the family, he was going to cut the bird. The turkey sat there, all golden and perfect and bursting with juice. I looked around at the people at the table, some of my favorite people in the world. I thought of my mother, everything on that table had been hers, or her idea. Mom would have been proud of my cooking prowess, my decorating and my table. The mood was great, wine glasses had been filled, and it was all just perfect. Absolutely the most perfect Thanksgiving EVER. We said grace. My brother lifted the cutting set, one of those large knives with the matching fork with two long tines that ended with a guard, like on a sword pommel.

Now let me tell you a bit about my brother. He was a hyper child, a hyper teenager and a hyper adult. He could never sit still and was filled with boundless energy. He was always in the NOW, and at the time, jumped on everything he did, be it his job, his sporting activities, his enthusiasm for whatever his interests were, everything. He is entirely opposite to me. I’m very measured, I rarely get really excited, and I don’t jump into things. Mark leaps into the world with wild abandon. Time and fatherhood have barely slowed him down.

Mark stabbed the turkey with the fork and attacked it with the knife. As he was cutting, the turkey was sliding around the platter and turkey juice was splattering all over the perfect and pristine tablecloth. The juice contained a fair degree of fat and oil and the stains were going to be hard to get out of the cloth. He was ruining my Thanksgiving! I’m embarrassed to say I totally lost it. My guests were staring at me as I went into a full-blown explosion over the staining of my carefully ironed tablecloth. They had never seen me lose my temper like that. I was totally irrational. Mark stared at me like he didn’t know me. Deb still teases me about it, 25 years later, usually at Thanksgiving.

Well, after I calmed down, and Mark finished hacking up the turkey, we had a wonderful meal. There were no more incidents, and my perfect Thanksgiving, my channeling of my mother’s taste and skills was a total success. It took several washings to get the oil stains out of the tablecloths, but I got them out.

After living in our Jefferson Avenue house for 17 years, I was able to buy a house on nearby Pacific Street in Crown Heights North, the next neighborhood over. Moving the furniture over there, about 10 blocks away will be the topic of another post one of these days. Suffice it to say, things were not as I had hoped in the move. But eventually, the dining room was set up in my new house, and my very heavy furniture made its way to its new home.

Thanksgiving traditions continued as before. Over the years, the guests changed, the room was different, but not much else. The familiar table was set as it always was. At least eight of us were gathered around the table, surrounded by late 19th century elegance in marble, wood and glass. The large table was covered with a white linen tablecloth (a different one!) and filled to overflowing with food, just like Mom used to make, with just enough room for plates, silverware and glasses. We lit the candles in the center of the table and lowered the lights.

We said a heartfelt prayer of thanks, we remembered those who couldn’t be with us, and we carved the turkey (with no drama) and began passing the dishes around the table. People who may not have known each other well became better friends over a good meal. We laughed and shared stories while we ate. All the while, I sat at the head of my table, making sure everyone had everything they needed. More than once I sat there with tears in my eyes.

I will always miss my Mom, my Dad, my Aunt Joice, and others who are watching from above. I have so much to be thankful for, I am so loved. My table, which has traveled far in my lifetime, still had one more journey to take, to Troy, where it sits in my apartment today. There will be more memorable Thanksgivings and holidays to come here in Troy. I still have all the accoutrements. It will always be big enough to seat my world.

May your Thanksgiving be blessed and happy, no matter how you choose to celebrate.

(My Gilbertsville house. I took this picture in the early 1970s. There have been many changes here, too, and also not for the better. Thank goodness for memories.)