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Meals together are an act of community building

Time together is what makes the holidays worthwhile.

Author

Liam Nolan
December 02, 2024

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Welcome back to The Clubhouse!

Thanksgiving has officially come and gone, and if you’re anything like me, you’re giving thanks that it’s over, even if having a few days off was really, really nice. In this issue of The Clubhouse, we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving and community.

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Meals together are an act of community building

by Liam Nolan

My weirdest Thanksgiving experience was in the ‘90s at a rural hockey arena.

That year, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I was living with my dad. This wasn’t because my parents were divorced or separated in any formal way. Instead, my mom had, two years prior, moved to a city eight hours away to finally get her college degree. The next year, my older brother moved to the same city after finishing high school. That Thanksgiving, they’d decided they weren’t coming home for the holidays.

My dad figured the best thing to do would be to take us to a local minor league hockey game, where they were serving Thanksgiving dinner in a small, windowless room nestled behind the ticket counter. At some point early on, my dad left to go watch the game, leaving me alone to eat cold turkey and pumpkin pie.

That experience of Thanksgiving is one that’s stuck in my head for a long time. Even decades later, I can still remember how lonely it felt to sit at that table, and the sweetness of the pumpkin pie topped with whipping cream. It wasn’t bad, per se. It was a holiday without any sort of arguing or problems. There was no half-drunk uncle espousing his thoughts on different races, invalidating family members refusing to acknowledge fundamental parts of my being, or the other issues that so many other people experienced. At the same time, I was alone.

In the years since that Thanksgiving, I’ve gotten married and moved an extremely far distance from my family. My wife and I started to host Thanksgiving, but the last two years, most of the older adults have started to sort of drift away and do their own thing. Our Thanksgiving has thus morphed into a sort of hodgepodge of cousins, siblings, and associated friends who, for one reason or another, have nowhere else they can go. Inviting people in for the holidays means welcoming them into your community and giving them the companionship that make those holidays great in the first place.

I’ve come to really value spending time with people during those holidays. I’m someone who can fairly easily fall out of touch with others, even if I’m making an active effort not to do so. Sitting down with people and eating food with them — being able to provide an act of service to them by making that food — is intensely valuable to me, because it’s time spent in community. Being able to sit down with those people and watch all of Netflix’s Kaos over the course of two days in a tryptophan-induced haze was worthwhile.

Community is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot since the 2024 election ended. As I’ve gotten older, my trust in institutions has eroded in pretty profound ways. However, people still matter. The relationships that we cultivate with others are fundamentally what makes life worth living. Watching Kaos with people wasn’t productive in any formal, capitalist sense, but it was healing for me as a person, because it helped me remember that I’m part of a community that I’ve chosen to be a part of and welcome people into. No one has to be a lonely kid eating Thanksgiving dinner at a hockey arena.

Thanksgiving has its problems, and I recommend reading this wonderful Vogue article from Christian Allaire if you want to hear about some of them, so I don’t want to limit this to Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, in the grand scheme of things, is completely irrelevant. If it were gone, what we’d miss about Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the turkey or the pumpkin pie — it’d be engaging in community and connecting with people, because people are what matters.

There’s a pretty good chance that things are about to get worse for a lot of people in a lot of ways, and at the end of the day, we only have each other. Mutual aid is going to be one of the most effective tools in helping others navigate what’s coming. At the same time, mutual aid is about more than just helping people get access to resources (although that’s an important part of it). It’s also about developing a community, and times where we sit down and break bread together are a part of that.

One of the most radical things you can do going forward is hosting dinners, meals, and holidays for people who might not have anywhere else to go. So the next time a major holiday comes along, consider reaching out to someone who might not have any other place to go and bringing them to your table to break bread. That sort of love can, in a person’s life, make all the difference.

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