Families have never been packaged into neat little shrink-wrapped and pre-proportioned containers. Even “traditional” families fissure in unexpected ways through divorce, death or other separations. But what matters around Thanksgiving is to celebrate with loved ones.  For many people, that means traveling back home – wherever home may be – to celebrate with one’s family. But increasingly, as more young adults move to new cities to make new lives, they are deciding to celebrate the family-oriented holiday of Thanksgiving with friends. It’s so common that it has its own moniker: “Friendsgiving”.  So every year, the weekend before Thanksgiving, about 30 of my closest friends cram into our small apartment (and use its narrow galley kitchen) to feast on our most-cherished holiday foods – and it’s the best.  When we first started holding the dinners that became our annual pre-Thanksgiving weekend tradition in 2008, we were all single young professionals who had recently moved to Washington DC who couldn’t necessarily afford to fly home to our families, and my then-boyfriend (now husband), Ben, and his roommates had everyone come by their large, dilapidated group house. Friendsgiving wasn’t yet the stuff of bad trend stories, unless you count that one episode of Friends. We just did it because we all thought we could make better versions of Thanksgiving food and it’s more fun to get drunk with your friends anyway. This year, most of us are married or coupled, and one couple is expecting a baby in the spring. One of our guests even asked if he could bring his mom, who was visiting him for the holiday week.  The Friendsgiving we hosted this year was fancier than the ones we had in those early days, when we were all younger and less practiced in the kitchen. Ben made two smoked turkeys – which takes about seven hours and end up tasting more like bacon than turkey. I made mashed potatoes and gravy, relying on the wisdom of the Pioneer Woman, who urges us all to be fearless with the butter, cream cheese and half-and-half.  Everyone else brings the rest of the traditional side dishes: stuffing, salad, cranberry sauce, sweet-potato pie and wine – lots of wine, which our one pregnant friend can no longer drink. There’s also gotten to be a bit of foodie one-upmanship, represented by one friend’s Brussels sprout salad and another’s pecan-edged sweet potato mash, but no one complains.  But for all the cleverer recipes and the fancier food, what actually matters is getting everyone together for another year – which was the point of the family Thanksgivings we all either couldn’t or didn’t want to go back to our hometowns for. We aren’t related by blood, but we’re still a family.  The idea of Friendsgiving isn’t particularly unique to us, but it is quietly radical in its way (even if it does have its haters). The conservative view is that your second family starts with a marriage between one man and one woman, preferably long before the ages we all our now – and, until then, your original family Thanksgiving should take top priority. But creating – and celebrating – families with the people you like rather than the people you might feel stuck with provides a lot of people more reason to give thanks.  Which is not to say that you have to eschew the more traditional family gatherings entirely – we still head north to celebrate the holiday my husband’s family, and I still cherish the ones I used to celebrate in Minnesota with my family (canned vegetables and all) when I was younger. Friendsgiving is about having the choice, and about not having to choose.
Kay Steiger: Just one more reason to be grateful: we can create families with our friends – not just the families we’re stuck with