Leftovers

Well, this year’s leftovers are pretty well taken care of.

That last piece of pumpkin pie make for a sweet breakfast and I finished off the stuffing and gravy at lunchtime. The turkey bones have been simmered down to a rich stock, waiting in the freezer to become soup on some winter chilled afternoon. About all that’s left is a glop and a half of Cool Whip quietly congealing on the bottom refrigerator shelf and three or four spoons of cranberry sauce – funny how the cranberries are always the last to go – that I may try mixing with my oatmeal in the morning. If that doesn’t work out, there are a couple of squirrels fattening in the neighborhood that might well find it to their liking.

Yeah, it was a good Thanksgiving. Good day. Good meal. Good leftovers.

Y’know, in a lot of ways the leftovers are the best part…

I’ve never quite understood folks who complain about making too much food on Thanksgiving. Really, isn’t the presence of too much food – a dinner table groaning under a caloric overload far, far surpassing the gastric capacity of the friends and family gathered around it – is not only at the literal, but the spiritual, center of the occasion? If we’re not thankful for too much food to eat, too much food even to share, what can we possibly be thankful for?

If we’re ever confronted with the essential First-World problem, this is it – having too much to eat. Not that for the most of us it isn’t a very real issue – the fact that virtually every bathroom has an overtaxed scale is testimony enough to that – it’s no less important to set aside at least one day a year as a reminder that it wasn’t ever so thus.

And for a lot of folks, a whole lot of folks, it still isn’t.

For those of us who rarely go an hour without a full stomach, it’s easy to forget that. When we are consistently surrounded by more food than we could ever eat at one sitting abundance has become so much background noise. “Too much” has become one more thing to get rid of rather than a cause of celebration and a wellspring for gratitude.

No doubt, that’s a nice problem to have. But it does create a problem of a different sort. With our appetites over-surfeited it’s hard to see beyond the calories. Hard to truly appreciate those Thanksgiving leftovers, hard to see beyond the cold corn and congealing gravy. Hard to realize there’s much more there than a turkey sandwich for tomorrow’s lunch.

There ought to better reason to take a Thursday off than to simply eat too much and watch football. That groaning table connects us to the “too muchness” of life. The traditional menu, heavy with gravy, pie, and a concoction of canned beans and Campbell’s soup – foods thoroughly out of step with contemporary taste, brings to mind and body the memory that what we have and what we enjoy is rooted in times and people long and recently past. It reminds us of a good fortune to which we owe our gratitude.

At least for all of us who are experiencing good fortune. For the moment war, depression, poverty, hunger, loss aren’t our fate. But there’s a reason we refer to traditional meals as comfort food; tangible, flavorful reminders that perhaps hope still lives and life still harbors reason to give thanks. We, the overfed, the over privileged, the overprotected, find it so easy to lose sight of that.

So it’s good we have at least one day a year when, at least in theory, we give a thought to how fortunate we are to have too much to eat. How lucky we are to run out of room in the refrigerator, to feel bad about having way too much.

At least once a year, it’s good to take time to be thankful for leftovers.