Vox Meditantis

Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?

Thursday, 27th November 2025

There is a particular comedy to being asked, twice in the same week, to catalogue what one feeds people – though the punchline only lands if you’ve been paying attention. Last Friday’s question wanted favourite family meals, as if appetite were a league table with bronze, silver, and gold. Today’s version arrives dressed for the occasion, asking about holiday dishes specifically, which I suppose is meant to give us all permission to be more ceremonial about our answers, to reach for the recipes that announce occasion rather than merely sustenance. The humour, such as it is, lies in discovering that the answers haven’t changed much between prompts – only the ambient pressure to perform gratitude has intensified, courtesy of a holiday that asks Americans to pause, count blessings, and ignore the rather complicated history folded into the cranberry sauce.

Still, the question is a fair one, and it arrives on a day when three kitchens have been quietly arguing their case since dawn – Mother’s casino-bright improvisation, Father’s municipal steadiness, and the small, high-ceilinged room upstairs where I’ve spent the past hours attempting to reconcile both.

Mother’s Leap, Father’s Roast

Elizabeth Scott, before she became Elizabeth Bennett and moderated her brightness for New Corinth, worked the casino floors in Reno with the sort of open-faced charm that turned strangers into co-conspirators within a single shift. She fed people the same way she moved through rooms – with exuberance, a certain theatrical flair, and an unshakeable belief that if you smiled warmly enough whilst serving something interesting, any technical shortcomings would be forgiven. Her risotto – which was really a brave, undisciplined pilaf – arrived on our table with lemon zest, whatever looked promising at the market, and enough steam and chatter to fill the kitchen with the sense that something festive was underway, even if it was only a wet Tuesday in November.

The rice was sometimes crunchy. The stock occasionally ambitious in its seasonings. But the spirit of those meals taught me something useful: that food is a form of welcome, and welcome doesn’t require perfection – only warmth and the willingness to let people help you get the technique right mid-course. She’d hand me the wooden spoon and say, Stir it like you mean it, Catherine, which I now recognise as an instruction not about risotto but about showing up with intent, about refusing to let caution bully you out of attempting the thing.

Joseph Bennett, by contrast, approached Sunday lunch with the same steady competence he brought to bus timetables – roast lamb or beef, vegetables that knew their place, gravy that didn’t make grand claims but kept its promises. He never called it cooking, exactly – more ensuring that everyone got fed, the same practical ethic that meant passengers arrived safely and on time. His meals didn’t announce themselves. They simply appeared, reliably, and you left the table steadied rather than dazzled, which is its own form of nourishment.

I learned from him that food can be an architecture of care – that the patient work of browning meat properly, of letting bones simmer into stock, of mashing potatoes until they hold their shape without losing their give, is a discipline worth practising. It says: Tomorrow will come, and we will still be here to meet it, and in the meantime, you are fed.

Between the two of them, I inherited the belief that feeding people is never merely about the plate – it’s about the atmosphere you create whilst stirring, the permission you extend to be hungry without apology, the small rituals that turn necessity into something closer to sacrament.

The Ginger Biscuits, Retrieved

This morning, before the day properly announced its agenda, I found myself standing at the kitchen counter with Mother’s recipe card propped against the flour tin – Ginger Biscuits in her brisk, slanting hand, margins dotted with old butter stains like punctuation. I’d retrieved it weeks ago from the guest-room box, meaning to file it safely with the other relics, but it had migrated to the counter and stayed there, a small dare I kept declining.

Today felt different. The flat was already smelling of stock and bay leaves from the soup I’d started before dawn, and the modest roast was behaving itself in the oven with Father’s disciplined patience. There was time – more accurately, I’d built in time, a small act of resistance against my usual habit of scheduling domestic tasks like surgical procedures – so I cleared a space, measured out the ingredients with more care than Mother ever bothered with, and let my hands learn the rhythm she’d known by heart.

The dough came together with the particular stubbornness of ginger and treacle, dark and sweet and sharp all at once. Rolling it out, cutting rounds with the rim of a glass because I’ve never owned proper cutters, laying them on the baking sheet with enough space to spread – these small geometries felt less like following instructions and more like a conversation across decades. You can do this, the card seemed to say. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth offering.

They baked whilst I ladled soup into containers for the community meal, and the flat filled with the sort of smell that announces someone has been tending things here – ginger and warmth and the faint ghost of my mother’s Nevada kitchen, transplanted to a Victorian building on the Delaware where she’d eventually learn to call herself local.

When I lifted them from the oven, they looked… honestly, they looked better than I’d expected. Crisp at the edges, still soft enough in the centre to promise they wouldn’t assault anyone’s teeth, carrying that particular spice that makes you reach for a second without quite noticing you’ve finished the first. I set half aside for this evening’s table and wrapped the rest for the meal at the church hall, a small edible testimony that inheritance can be practised as well as preserved.

Midday, Amongst Neighbours

St. Mary’s parish hall smelled of onions and bread and the particular warmth that comes from too many people working in a space designed for half their number. The Thanksgiving community meal – an occasion that’s become something between civic duty and genuine hospitality – had drawn the usual assembly of volunteers and guests, the boundaries between helper and helped kept deliberately porous so that dignity doesn’t require auditions.

Elena Moretti was already at the counter when I arrived, sleeves rolled, her hands moving through vegetables with the brisk economy of someone who’s fed families for decades and knows that speed matters less than steadiness. She nodded at the soup containers I’d brought, approved wordlessly, and set me beside Kevin Lawson at the serving line where our job was simply to ladle and smile and not ask questions that might require explanations.

Kevin has the gift of practical charm – he organises the river clean-ups with the same easy competence, turning strangers into something like community through the basic choreography of shared labour. Today he kept up a gentle patter with the people moving through the line, learning names without making it feel like an interview, offering seconds before anyone had to ask. Between servings, he caught my eye and grinned. Your soup’s a hit, Doc. What’s the secret?

Stock, I said. And time. Both underrated.

The hours passed in that particular rhythm of repetitive work that quiets the mind – ladle, serve, smile, next person, repeat. Across the hall, Jenny appeared with her librarian’s gift for seeing where help was needed before anyone thought to ask, moving between tables with coffee and conversation, her scarf the colour of persimmons bright against the parish hall’s institutional beige. Father Walsh worked the room in his gentle, unhurried way, stopping to speak with the elderly Polish man who comes each week, the young mother with three children navigating the line whilst balancing plates, the veteran whose hands shake just enough that pouring his own coffee requires more courage than he wants to admit.

This is what Thanksgiving looks like here, stripped of the performative gratitude and the contested origin story – just New Corinth feeding itself, one ladle at a time, with enough warmth that being hungry doesn’t also require being invisible.

By half-two, the crowd had thinned, the dishes were soaking, and I’d packed the ginger biscuits onto a platter for the volunteers’ table. Elena took one, bit carefully, and delivered her verdict with the authority of someone whose grandmother taught her to judge baking by texture as much as taste. Your mother would approve, she said, which felt like absolution I hadn’t quite realised I’d been seeking.

Evening Table, Deliberately Small

David arrived at six with a bottle whose label suggested someone at Riverfront Books had steered him well, and a bunch of late chrysanthemums that looked like they’d been chosen for hardiness rather than elegance – a choice that somehow made them more honest. He has learned the route to my kitchen well enough now that I didn’t need to hover in the hallway performing hostess, just called from the stove that the door was open and he should come through.

Jenny appeared ten minutes later with a salad that looked like actual effort rather than obligation – winter greens, roasted squash, something involving pomegranate seeds that suggested she’d been thinking ahead. She took one look at the table I’d half-set and said, with her particular brand of affectionate tyranny, You’ve put out the wrong glasses, and where’s the bread basket? Then proceeded to rearrange things with the confidence of someone who’s known me since we were both seven and has long since stopped pretending I’m competent at domestic theatre.

The fourth chair held Priya Sharma – the architect from the converted warehouse down the street, whose work on humane waiting rooms I’ve been stealing ideas from for months. She’d mentioned, in passing at Marcus’s last week, that she’d be spending today alone whilst her family visited cousins in Pennsylvania, and I’d heard myself extend the invitation before my usual caution could intervene. She arrived with homemade naan wrapped in foil, still warm, the smell cutting through the kitchen like a quiet kindness.

The fifth chair stayed empty.

Not by accident, not by miscalculation, but as a deliberate echo of the Harbouring Day tradition – that practice, older than any of us at the table, of keeping one place set for whoever might need it, for the memory of those who couldn’t be here, for the acknowledgement that hospitality means leaving room for what we can’t quite predict. Father Walsh does this at the rectory each year. Maggie mentioned that the Historical Society documented the custom back to the nineteenth century, when harbour families set places for sailors lost at sea, for immigrants still making passage, for the dead who shaped the city and deserved a symbolic seat at its tables.

The empty chair asked nothing of us. It simply stood as quiet evidence that we’d chosen to make this gathering something slightly larger than our own small circle – that we’d left the door, metaphorically speaking, just fractionally ajar.

What Got Fed, What Got Shared

The roast came out as Father would have approved – no drama, just reliability in edible form. The vegetables had been given enough time to soften without surrendering dignity. The soup – white beans, rosemary, the last of Elena’s good tomatoes – tasted of patience and the particular comfort that comes from food that doesn’t shout. And the lemon-fennel risotto, made because I couldn’t quite give up Mother’s brightness entirely, arrived at the table glossy and alive, that quiet anise insistence playing against the shrimp’s sweetness like a conversation between generations.

We ate without ceremony, passing dishes and bread and filling silences with the sort of talk that doesn’t require polish. Priya described a project designing a community health centre where the waiting room doesn’t feel like punishment. Jenny recounted a library patron’s attempt to check out a book on “quiet crimes” which turned out to be a mishearing of “white-collar crimes,” a misunderstanding that had produced twenty minutes of baffled cross-purpose conversation. David mentioned, almost shyly, that he’d been practising Bach at the church hall on Tuesdays before the watercolour class, and wondered whether I might like to hear it sometime – not a performance, just the sound of someone working through passages that resist easy mastery.

I noticed, as I often do lately with a mix of gratitude and mild alarm, that no one at this table needed me to be Dr Bennett. They’d each seen versions of Catherine – fumbling with brushes, asking basic questions about naan technique, admitting that I still can’t quite master the Bach partita David keeps gently suggesting – and had apparently decided that was sufficient grounds for continued acquaintance.

Between courses, Jenny simply stood and started clearing plates, and when I moved to intercept – old habit, the hostess who won’t let guests lift a finger – she fixed me with that look she’s perfected since childhood and said, Sit down, Catherine. You’re not on duty. David was already at the sink, sleeves rolled with that peculiar care he brings to the work, and Priya had found the tea towels without needing direction.

So I sat. Let them move through my kitchen, learning where things lived, negotiating who would wash and who would dry, their voices low and companionable whilst I stayed at the table with my wine and the quiet, unsettling relief of being tended to rather than tending.

The ginger biscuits appeared on a plate without my orchestration – Jenny’s doing, arranged with the sort of casual grace that makes theatre look like thoughtlessness. We ate them with tea whilst the washing-up continued its gentle percussion in the background, and I thought about my mother’s recipe card, butter-spotted and patient, and how feeding people is only half the transaction. The other half – the one I’m still learning – is letting them feed you back. Not with grand gestures or elaborate reciprocity, but with the simple willingness to stand at your sink and restore order whilst you sit, for once, and watch the harbour darken outside the window.

What Thanksgiving Asks, What It Costs

Americans have a fraught relationship with this particular Thursday, and New Corinth is no exception. The official story – Pilgrims and Indigenous peoples sharing an improbable feast – has been gently corrected by historians and more forcefully challenged by those whose ancestors experienced colonial contact as catastrophe rather than cooperation. Our local schools now teach a more complicated narrative, one that includes treaties broken, populations decimated, and land taken with a ruthlessness that no amount of cranberry sauce can sweeten.

And yet here we are, midwinter approaching, gathered around tables because the human need for ritual survives even the most problematic origins. What do we do with a holiday whose foundations are mythological at best and violent at worst, but whose contemporary practice – pausing to name what we’re grateful for, feeding each other with intention, creating space for the people we’ve chosen as well as the ones we’ve inherited – feels worth preserving?

I don’t have a tidy answer. But sitting at this table tonight, with the empty chair keeping its patient vigil and the people I care for moving comfortably through my kitchen, I found myself thinking about what Thanksgiving might mean if we stripped away the pageantry and the contested history and simply honoured what actually happened here today.

We fed strangers at St. Mary’s, not because they’d earned it but because they were hungry. We sat with neighbours, not because kinship required it but because proximity had become, over months and years, something closer to chosen family. We left room – literally, in the form of that fifth chair – for absence and possibility both, acknowledging that hospitality means staying fractionally open to what we haven’t yet imagined.

That feels worth marking. Not with nationalist fervour or false innocence about how this country was built, but with the modest recognition that feeding each other, making room, showing up – these ordinary practices might be the best inheritance we have, regardless of how compromised their historical packaging.

New Corinth has its own Harbouring Day traditions, older and less commercially corrupted than Thanksgiving, rooted in the city’s identity as a river port where arrival and departure were constant facts of life. The empty chair belongs to that lineage – a practice that says we know people are always in passage, and we’ll hold space for them anyway. Tonight that chair held my parents, who aren’t here to see how their contradictory kitchens have merged in this small Victorian flat. It held the unnamed woman in the Historical Society’s daguerreotype, who crossed the Delaware in 1863 seeking freedom and found something more ambiguous. It held everyone who’s still making passage, still hungry, still hoping that the city might yet deliver on its promises.

And it held, without drama, the simple acknowledgement that I don’t have to fill every seat to make a meal matter – that incompleteness isn’t failure but a form of honesty.

What I Didn’t Do, On Purpose

David left near ten, after we’d finished the wine and the last of the ginger biscuits and talked ourselves into that comfortable quiet that means no one’s performing anymore. At the door, coat on, chrysanthemums still brightening the hallway table where Jenny had placed them earlier, he paused in that way he has – not expectant, exactly, but open, as if checking whether the evening might extend itself into something more.

I felt the old magnetic pull, the one that wants to translate companionship into something with clearer definitions and higher stakes. But beneath it, steadier and surprisingly insistent, was the recognition that tonight had been enough. More than enough, actually – it had been the thing I’ve been practising toward for months. Real presence. Modest welcome. The radical ordinariness of being with people without needing to manage every outcome or secure every next step.

So I simply thanked him – for the wine, for the dish duty, for showing up on a holiday when he could easily have chosen elsewhere – and let him go into the November cold with a smile that said this matters, and we’ll do it again, and there’s no emergency requiring resolution tonight.

He seemed, if anything, relieved. Perhaps he’s learning the same lesson – that intimacy isn’t always about intensity or progression, that sometimes the deepest trust is built by choosing presence without agenda, by letting the evening end whilst it’s still good rather than pushing toward some imagined climax that might, in the pushing, become pressure instead of pleasure.

After he left, I stood in the kitchen whilst Jenny finished the last of the tidying she’d insisted on completing. She caught my eye, raised an eyebrow, and said nothing – which is Jenny’s way of saying I see what you just did, and I approve, and we don’t need to make a seminar out of it.

Priya had already gone, pleading an early site meeting tomorrow but leaving with the sort of warm thanks that suggested she’d be willing to be invited again. The flat settled into its nighttime quiet, harbour sounds filtering through the old windows, the radiators beginning their seasonal commentary on the day’s effort.

I sat for a moment in the chair that had held me during washing-up, the one that let me be served rather than serving, and noticed that I wasn’t restless, wasn’t mentally drafting tomorrow’s tasks or cataloguing what could have been managed better. I was simply here, at the end of a day that had asked me to feed people with intention and let them return the care, and I’d done both without disappearing into competence or fleeing into solitude when things felt tender.

That seems, improbably, like something to be grateful for – not because I’ve arrived at some plateau of psychological health where everything’s resolved, but because I managed, for one Thursday, to practise the thing I’m always prescribing. To stay present for the discomfort and the warmth both. To let the meal be messy and sufficient. To honour the empty chair and the filled ones equally.

To trust that chosen family can gather around inherited recipes, that Mother’s leaps and Father’s routes can merge into something I’m slowly learning to call ours, and that feeding people – and being fed in return – might be the most honest form of love available to those of us who are still learning to let ourselves be known.

The harbour is dark now, the Delaware doing its patient work beyond the window. Tomorrow will come with its clinic hours and its small decisions. But tonight, the kitchen is clean, the ginger biscuits are gone, and somewhere in the quiet, I can almost hear my mother saying, See? You can do this. It doesn’t have to be perfect to matter.

She was right, of course. As usual. It just took me fifty-eight years to believe her.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.