Let’s have a family Thanksgiving,” I said to my friend Mary, “without any blood relatives.” It was a time a few years ago when I had had my fill of filial histrionics and was fed up with the my-way-or-the-highway holiday hosts. I wanted a tradition without the traditional baggage, a happy feast prepared and shared by all — and lots of decent wine.

Mary and I couldn’t make it work that year; there were too many miles and too few days between us. And my frustration was a temporary thing, for as my younger siblings matured, then later found partners and had children of their own, they brought new traditions to the standard Southern mix. They nixed the tomato aspic but added organic winter salad; preserved my mother’s giblet gravy but offered vegetarian alternatives; gave in to my father’s love of sweet potatoes but acknowledged that caramelized acorn squash might be even better. They became adept at shaking up the kitchen without stepping on toes.

This was not an easy thing and, as the oldest child, I couldn’t do it alone. The centerpiece on the family table is a cornucopia of pithy opinions, fruit sometimes unpalatable or so full of seeds as to require an iron gut. I was the royal taster for quite some time. In the mid-1980s, when Robert and I were graduate students and newly engaged, fellow scholars interning in France and Germany joined those of us in Brussels to share the American holiday. Each of us was assigned a Thanksgiving dish, and then set out on the adventure of finding a European equivalent. I searched everywhere for yams. I found them, finally, at the African market, a tented shop that appeared at the neighborhood square every weekend and quickly filled with women of the Congo, exotically perfumed and draped in their traditional garb. Those yams had an alien destiny.
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