At Mocksgiving on Saturday, someone asked me if I’d ever written about it. And on Bluesky, where you can find me as Fairoriana as pretty much on any platform, Wise Old Coot John Scalzi reminded us that having our own platform, that we control, means that there’s resilience in ecosystem. The social channels may change but our creation likely remains. I’ll admit that part of the reason I stopped writing so much is that the Facebook algorithm now more or less buries any content like this. If you are not writing for the engagement and audience, it’s called a “journal” folks. I have one of those too. But I like writing for people and I miss it, and I prefer the long form ~1000 word first person style that is blogging. So here you go. One post about Mocksgiving.
I should note, I have a personal commitment not to apologize for my lackluster posting schedule in the posts. Otherwise my last 5 years of posts would all start with “Sorry it’s been so long it’s been really busy and it got away from me” and that’s just tedious.
Anyway, let me bring you back to November of 2000. I have just turned 22. I have been married a grand total of 3 months and my college diploma is 6 months old. We are living in a Philadelphia duplex in Roslindale, Massachusetts, where the dishwasher is my husband and we have no microwave. We are paying $1200 a month for a three bedroom, one bath apartment with beautifully exposed woodwork and vertiginous stairs leading up to the two small bedrooms. We have one car, and two hamsters. I have just subscribed to Money Magazine, which sits by the toilet, due to a panicked realization I have no idea whatsoever how insurance actually works. My husband is working for USWeb/CKS as a coder. I’m a coder for a full remote company called Geekteam, which according to the Wayback machine at the time had a raffle for a Palm 3 and specialized in “ebusiness Obstetrics”. It was this one dude in Lewiston/Auburn Maine. The 9/11 attacks had happened only a few weeks before – our apartment was robbed the same day – and things still seemed unsettled.
But my in-laws, I had discovered, had a tradition of having their Thanksgiving meal at a restaurant. I was horrified (I was easily horrified back then) and promptly invited everyone to our apartment for the Thanksgiving meal. I was young, inexperienced, but not an idiot. I knew that making your first turkey for your entire new family of inlaws on Thanksgiving day proper was the way many a sitcom episode started. Those episodes usually ended with Chinese takeout and/or pizza, a la “A Christmas Story”. So two weeks before Thanksgiving, I bought a turkey and pleaded with my local college friends (over email, because we were savvy like that – this is before texting or social media were really things) to come and eat it with me. We called like three sets of moms regarding various aspects of turkey preparation. I made bread. We got cranberry sauce from a can. We used our wedding china for the first time. We had a BLAST.
I did not end up hosting Thanksgiving for my inlaws – in fact I never did. But we had so much fun with our “Mock Thanksgiving” that Mocksgiving happened again the next year, and the following. It’s always been potluck and with many helping hands. I make the basics, my friends bring what they will. If you’re standing in the kitchen (or near the kitchen) between when the turkey comes out of the oven, you will be put to work. I usually start my preparations a week in advance, and spend the entire day before baking, prepping, cleaning and cooking. There were a few years there, in the early 2000s, where I threw out open invitations to my friends on Livejournal to show up who would. Now I have to be careful – we sat ~35-40 for dinner this year (simultaneously), and probably a total of 60 people were here at some point during the evening. The house isn’t big enough to seat many more.
I’ve hosted Mocksgiving a few weeks after giving birth (literally two weeks in the case of my youngest child). It’s snowed. We’ve deep fried turkeys and had turducken. The attendees have shifted and evolved as our lives have – only one of the original attendees was there this Saturday. During 2020, I mailed out recipe cards of all my standard recipes to my much missed friends. We’ve had the first of our friends who always flew in for the day die, and that taught me how grateful I was that he always made it and also to make sure you ALWAYS take a group picture. It started as a sleepover party, with breakfast the next day part of the deal. Now we all want “beds” and “a good night’s sleep”. We’ve played a thousand board games – I think Richochet Robot has been broken out after the pie since nearly the first year. We’ve welcomed neighbors, babies, friends of friends. I finally learned how to spell the word “meringue” without looking it up. An entirely different party began to happen on the second floor, as the kids required less and less supervision and developed their own subculture. Some years we just sent up pizza as an offering to the second floor and held our breaths.
One thing I’ve learned is that my experience of Mocksgiving is very predictable. I think the same things at the same times during this process I’ve executed so many times. The day before I wonder if anyone will come. When I make the lemon meringue pie I think the lineup of “yellows” for it is so beautiful. I always regret not getting the turkey in the oven earlier. I often “narrate” the experience to “you” – the imaginary readers of this blog. The fascinating things I tell you in my mind are more or less the same year after year.
So, maybe in the year to come I’ll talk a little more to you. Maybe if we’re not ONLY on Facebook, you’ll talk back. Maybe next year, I’ll recite the litany of Mocksgiving. And maybe we’ll all come away a little more fed and fuller from all that.
My Truant Pen 