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I also like–or used to–that it’s short and focused. Despite America’s recent embrace of brined turkeys (salty!), which dictates an even earlier start time for poultry prep, you really can’t stretch the festivities that far in either direction. There’s basically one main activity, not counting football or doing the dishes. You might call big-haul grocery shopping or last-minute convenience store shopping for cut flowers and more marshmallows part of it. But that’s it. There’s really only cooking and eating.
And although I’m not (exactly) a reactionary who wants nothing but Pepperidge Farm cubes for her stuffing, the virtue to be found in the predictability of a Thanksgiving menu makes all this seem that much more pointless. The constant pressure to serve food that’s the same but different–a byproduct of the pressure felt by the food media to fill up so many programming hours and sell us stuff without alienating tradition–in turn means that you often wind up picking some really gnarly objects out of your stuffing, usually there for “texture.”
