This isn’t what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like.
There was no sight of our parents, siblings, and relatives.
There was no gigantic spread of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. The only pie in sight was a few pumpkin slices Sarah’s dad had safely dropped off a few days prior.
There was no giant bags tournament, a recent tradition at Hoppen Thanksgiving gatherings.
Just like everything else, Thanksgiving looked a bit different in 2020.
Sarah and I decided early in November that, with COVID-19 cases on the rise in Nebraska and our elected officials and healthcare leaders asking people to avoid large gatherings, the only family we’d be seeing on Thanksgiving was each other.
There were still Zoom calls. We laughed with Sarah’s family at memories of sleep-walking accidents, and discussed the Huskers’ long-shot odds against Iowa with mine. We shared humorous tales of our new puppy, Benny, and his latest accomplishments (he learned how to stay!).
But it wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. We were supposed to be sitting next to these people, hugging them, dining with them. Instead, they were miles away.
2020 has managed to ruin so many things over the last 8 months. But we were determined not to let it take our Thanksgiving, too.
Of all the loves my wife and I share, pasta is near the top of the list. Most of our favorite restaurants in Omaha—Dante, Via Farina, WD Cravings, Au Courant (to name just a few)—offer handmade pasta, and we can’t get enough of it. We’d tried making our own pasta a few times previously, but the dough was too dry and took on water during boiling, turning the noodles into bloated, gummy strands. They were still OK, but not what we were looking for.
But with so much of 2020 Thanksgiving sure to be a bummer, I wanted to give us a win. Rather than cook a turkey, we were going to have our favorite food, and we were going to make it ourselves—the right way.
I reached out to Piero Cotrina, the pasta master at WD Cravings, and got some tips. With a new recipe in hand and a determination to roll the dough as thin as possible, we made far and away our most successful pasta to date. Tossed with some parmesan, butter, and bacon and served with a side of roasted brussel sprouts, it was a delicious Thanksgiving meal.
But was my wife and I savored our victory together on the couch, I realized it wasn’t the pasta itself that salvaged our Thanksgiving. It was that we had done it together.
Food gave us something to do together and brought us closer. We had a shared passion, a dual goal, and we needed each other to accomplish it. We laughed and kissed as we kneaded and rolled out dough, and high-fived when our final product came out as a success.
Did our bowls of pasta completely make up for the fact that our families weren’t there? That we were missing out on a host of memories typically made around the Thanksgiving table?
No, it did not.
But it did help deepen our marriage and provide some semblance of joy and normalcy in a year that has robbed us of so much of both.
And things aren’t assured to get better soon. We don’t know what Christmas is going to be like, much less 2021. There might be more holidays, birthdays, and get-togethers that look very different than they did at any other time in history.
But whatever the pandemic throws at us, it can’t take pasta or our memories away from us.
Happy Thanksgiving, and God bless!
