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[I've been working on this short radio essay about Orphan Thanksgiving dinnners. I thought it spoke to the way in which tribes formalize over time if they stay in the same location and keep their momentum up. -Ethan]

Not at Home for the Holidays

Years ago, when we were new to the city, we called them “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” These were the gatherings for those among us who could not afford the expense or time to make it back to family for the holiday. At the beginning of November those stranded in town would spread the word one by one friends of friends would make themselves known. When Thanksgiving Day rolled around the card tables placed end to end could not hold us all and many would be forced to couches and the edges of beds to balance paper plates on our knees.

The dinner was always potluck and there was always too much food. One year a card table collapsed under the weight of the offerings. Most of us tried to recreate the tastes of our childhoods in our efficiency kitchens. We called home for family recipes, the more ironic the better. There was always an elaborate Jell-O dish or a sweet potato casserole with mini-marshmallows. These dishes were partly spoofs on our middle class suburban upbringings but they were always eaten first because they really did remind us of home.

It was years ago that we called those gatherings “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” Something about them changed as my friends and I reached our late twenties and early thirties. The celebrations became more formal. The paper plates and coffee mugs were replaced with real, breakable dishes and matching wine glasses. Our tastes became more sophisticated as did our cooking skills. The haphazard potlucks turned into multi-course feasts with stuff portabella mushrooms and butternut squash risotto. There was still too much to eat but one of us had bought a house with a dining room and an oak table that could seat us all and handle the weight of the food.

But those weren’t the changes that mattered. What mattered was this: We could now afford the time and travel expense to make it home to our kin but we chose not to. More precisely, the very idea of where home was had changed in our minds. What had once been an affiliation of friends of friends �� a stopgap measure to support us during our time outside of family — had become the central social structure in our big city lives.

Looking back at my twenties, I can now see how we had been explorers in a new social landscape where it was suddenly the norm for both men and women to spend ten or more years living single, far away from our families and home towns. We delayed marriage longer than any generation in American History with no map for how to navigate that time. Faced with the social wilderness of the city we discovered that we could forge communities among our friends. Years ago we gathered haphazardly because we had no place else to go. Now my friends and I come together reverently with a desire to honor our group with this particular holiday. We give thanks for this self-made community and for the certainty that we are orphans no longer.

-Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes

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