In an effort to brighten spirits at the start of the holiday season, I thought I’d share one of the most ridiculous moments of Schuster family lore.

It was 1989, the Thanksgiving of my freshman year at New York University, and I had returned home to Wilton, Connecticut to spend the holiday with my family—parents (David and Carlotta), maternal grandmother (Nina), and paternal grandmother (Celia, better known as “Cele”, who at the time was still more than capable of driving there herself from Cedarhurst, Long Island). I am lucky and forever grateful to have been raised in an environment in which the hardest part of the holiday feast was in the preparation, timing, and cleanup, not the conversation. We, and all the guests we invited, were aligned politically. Well, OK, except occasionally for one couple we knew who were Reagan Republicans, but they kept it to themselves when mixing at dinner. In the 1980s, it seemed like much less of a divisive moralistic issue. Little did we know. 

Anyway, I’m not saying my family is perfect. Of course the Schusters have had our share of family drama and frustrations, but mostly we put the “fun” in “dysfunctional”. The Thanksgiving meal was a time to eat, drink, and be messy, and since our Danish modern dining table from the 1960s had built-in extensions, we could stretch it to hold more than a dozen place settings, and welcomed the chance to do so.