The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday!

Frances Brundage, Thanksgiving Day Greetings(detail), ca. 1913.

I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, based solely on the fact that I adore turkey. But if I were to remove turkey from the equation, I would probably realize that this holiday, for me, has been nothing but one hideous thing after another.

Why Thanksgiving is the nexus of all despair is a mystery. But to prove that it is, here’s a short list of some of the things I remember. 

1956, New Haven, Connecticut

The table is beautifully set in the dining room of the gracious colonial house on Trumbull Street, where my aunt and uncle live. I am ten years old, and my older cousins—Eric, seventeen, and his sister, Willa, thirteen—are my teen idols. After the family takes a few snapshots of all of us smiling, the food is spread out on the table and the shit hits the fan. Uncle Henry makes a snide remark about Elvis Presley, who has just been on The Ed Sullivan Show, and cousin Willa flings herself from the table in a histrionic fit. The whole table erupts into a pro- and anti-Elvis fight. The dinner is ruined, no one is hungry, and the gravy curdles as “All Shook Up” blasts from the phonograph in Willa’s room behind the slammed door.

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