It’s Thanksgiving. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? — Stranger Thanksgiving

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Going home for the holidays is like going to the Upside Down, back in time to when the world still felt strange and new. Welcome to Stranger Thanksgiving, inspired by Netflix’s hit Stranger Things and Thanksgivings of our childhoods. Today Jenni Ferrari-Adler, editor of Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, writes about childhood Thanksgivings and how they affect her still.

When I was the Girl Cousin, we drove under the Hudson River through the long tunnel to New Jersey once a month. In traffic my parents argued — if we’d left earlier!; if we’d taken the other tunnel; the other turn — every time. I kicked my little brother to distract him. If my father didn’t have a temper. If my mother were more confident. If my parents’ parents had learned different lessons from their parents. The oil fields stank. I asked my father to please stop the car so I could be sick on the shoulder of the highway.

Adam and I didn’t have car seats or car snacks. We stared out the window at the birds clustered on telephone wires. There were infinity cars traveling the same way we were. I was obsessed with all the lives being lived in close proximity. Also with orphans and made-up lands. I read voraciously and indiscriminately — Sweet Valley High, The Flowers in The Attic, The Pistachio Prescription — for clues about other families and the future. I collected foreign coins, smooth stones, and rabbits’ feet. I stared at landscape paintings and tried to enter them. I wrote stories about girls who pumped their legs so hard their swings flew off the chains and transported them to other realms.

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