Traditio-o-on! Tradition!

Like every other American, I follow some sacrosanct Thanksgiving customs every year. These are highly personal and based on family tradition. I’d like to take a moment to share the madness with you, faithful reader.

Being Thanksgiving and all, most of our customs revolve around food. We have a pretty normal lineup for the actual meal – turkey, stuffing, gravy, peas, etc. And dessert is pretty tame too –apple pie and pumpkin pie.

No, the craziness begins before the actual meal. I’m talking white-trash hors-d’oeuvres. In the Mance family, coming from a, er, rustic background as we do, these little nibbles are a throwback to the days where our forefathers lived through the depression by eating crap and pretending it was good. This tradition was carried into today by our family’s strong desire to remember out past. Also, we will eat almost anything, we Mances.

Absolutely essential in my house are the following:

1. A small olive tray, half full of regular green olives with pimentos, half full of those disgusting little pickles they call gherkins. Each year, my dad and I dutifully bite into a gherkin, to see if maybe this is the year we will finally see what mom likes about them. We always fail to see their charm and throw the other half away. Mom then proceeds to eat two of them, and the rest stay in the tray where they dry out over the course of the afternoon. The tradition is to keep the remainder in a jar in the fridge, untouched, until next Thanksgiving, when it is thrown out and replaced by a new jar. And the cycle begins anew.
2. A small bowl of mixed nuts (extra salty, please!)
3. A plate of stuffed dried dates. These are stuffed with cream cheese or peanut butter, and then sprinkled with confectioners sugar. They are about as attractive and tasty as they sound.
4. A plate of stuffed celery. These are stuffed with an appetizing combination of liverwurst, cream cheese (or mayo), and a tiny bit of mustard. I can hear you gagging already. I love them, and look forward to the liverwurst all year long. Who needs paté?
5. Finally, before we actually sit down to the turkey, everyone gets a small glass full of V-8. As dictated by tradition, we liberally dose the V-8 with pepper and salt, despite the fact that the juice is in fact, 96% salt to begin with.

Yes, we’ve occasionally added other foods – cheese & crackers are usually included, sometimes a little crudite and dip, but the real workhorses of pre-meal snacking are always the same.

It helps that we usually eat early too – no one can hold out until 6 p.m. by eating liverwurst on celery or sticky gummy dates. Also, eating these kind of gross appetizers gives us something to be thankful for: the ability to not eat them the other 364 days of the year.