Thanksgiving Storytelling

Thanksgiving Storytelling

Do you remember the Thanksgiving your grandma baked her famous apple pie? What about the time you ate turkey and stuffing? The time you laughed with your cousins and over-ate?

What we love about Thanksgiving is its sameness. If you’re trying to write an essay about any major holiday, you’re really going to have to find the details. Without them, you don’t have a story at all.

One of my students wrote about her family’s multicultural Thanksgiving—how very different foods sat side-by-side at the table. Another wrote about her family’s multicultural Thanksgiving—how very different people sat side-by-side at the table. These stories worked because they were real. The student didn’t just say, “Our family Thanksgiving brings together food from all over the world.” She described her favorite dishes and why each was important. Don’t write, “My family has to work hard to get along.” Write, “My grandma has always voted Republican. All three of her daughters vote Democrat. Somehow, none of them can resist starting something.”

What is your goal in writing about a holiday? Is it to feature your family? To make a reader laugh? To show off descriptive writing? A holiday piece can work—more often as a supplement than as a central essay—but you can’t evaluate whether it’s succeeding until you know what you’re hoping it’s going to do.

Don’t be hard on yourself at the brainstorming stage, though. If you stop yourself from putting down every idea because you’re sure it’s too cliché, you’re never going to get to the deeper level where your original ideas and memories wait. So start your list with turkey and stuffing, and then remember the year that your aunt decided to do an all-vegan Thanksgiving without giving anyone a heads-up first. Or maybe it was your own first vegetarian Thanksgiving, and you remember the fear of being different and the feeling of passing the turkey plate without stopping to serve yourself.

The more time you spend in these memories, the more the ball of loosely related ideas unwinds, leading you to more interesting stories. Follow the thread wherever it goes, even if you find yourself moving on before finishing a memory. If you’re bored writing it, your reader is going to be bored reading it. Drop the boring story in midsentence if you must, but keep writing.

This Thanksgiving was probably the most different you’ve ever had—whether it was traveling during a pandemic or having dinner with a laptop on the table to invite your distant family in. If you’re not yet a senior, you might want to think about capturing these memories before they blur together. If you’re already in the midst of applications, consider whether these stories contribute to the picture you’re presenting of yourself. Writing about current happenings is fair game, as long as you take the time to make connections with the past and consider the implications for the future.

(Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash)