The best part of Thanksgiving is what comes next.
Not the monthlong march toward Christmas. Or the Black Friday bacchanal of spending.
Nope, I’m talking about something that we take for granted. Something that often gets overlooked or discarded. Something some people complain about being too plentiful.
Leftovers.
First, there are the sandwiches. Then there are the extra potatoes and stuffing and green bean casserole and pie, glorious pie, that make up so many second-day lunches and late-night snacks.
But most important of all is the culinary alchemy that can take the turkey carcass and render it into rich, delicious stock.
Remember the 1983 holiday classic “A Christmas Story,” when young Ralphie’s family lost their beautifully roasted bird to the neighbor’s dogs? It wasn’t the dinner itself that he lamented. It was the leftovers, especially “gallons of turkey soup, gone, all gone!”
For me, the world has always been divided into two groups: people who whine about leftovers and people who covet them. I learned this from my grandmother, who could work magic with a soup pot and a casserole dish.
She didn’t lament the days of turkey-based meals that followed Thanksgiving or Christmas. She saw them as a gift that let her feed her family. She took them as a challenge — a food-based jigsaw puzzle.
We need more of that, and not just in the kitchen. It’s the kind of creativity that makes a difference in government and business and education.
We need to look at situations as opportunities instead of obstacles. We need to look at excess as not just a pile of stuff to be discarded but as a test to see how much can be accomplished.
And 2020 is exactly why. This year has been about a lot of problems to overcome. Some have been the big ones that demand task forces and press conferences — the coronavirus pandemic, economic roller coasters.
But some have been in our backyard. How do we bake bread when we can’t buy it? Can we make yeast if we can’t find it? How do we keep the kids engaged with school while they are on quarantine?
Big or small, they have had one thing in common. The best approaches to new vaccines or solutions to cabin fever have been about looking at problems with fresh eyes and using what we have available in new ways.
And if we do that, there’s not much we can’t cook up out of something someone else might just pitch in the trash.
