A sunshine-y San Diego Thanksgiving

Marilyn Gardner Woods
Nov 24, 2025
2 min read

Marshmallows on the sweet potatoes or not?

Packaged dressing? Yes or No?

Why is turkey so damn expensive?

Pertinent questions like this are being asked in homes throughout my neighborhood. The city. State. Country, for God’s sakes. Pertinent questions about the most over-stuffed holiday of the year.

It’s Thanksgiving.

Ninety-four percent of people in the United States will celebrate the holiday this year.

A holiday time for counting the number around the dining room table, counting blessings—and a time for NOT counting calories.

A time when mirth is personified as parents, children, relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and little ones come together around the annual feast and hopefully survive the day without a blow-up like the one in one of my favorite movies—Home for the Holidays from 1995 directed by Jodie Foster.

This rare Thanksgiving movie in a field of Christmas one’s stars Holly Hunter as a burnt-out single mom who returns to her childhood home, has a fight with her mom in the pantry, and watches Robert Downey Jr. attempt to carve the turkey which ends up in his sister’s lap!

I must watch again.

Not sure what my Thanksgiving meal will be.

I am without family this year for the first time in my entire life. Happily, they are celebrating with faraway children and extended families. I have politely declined good friends’ invitations.

There will be no lukewarm mashed potatoes, lumpy gravy, or any sort of bland, all-beige meals mounded high for me. I will have my very good friend’s cranberry salad.

Maybe with a hotdog.

However, it just so happens that there’s an extraordinarily entertaining gentleman who happens to be in the same gravy boat I am.

We’re making a plan.

May or may not involve turkey. Pretty sure it won’t involve football. And definitely no rehashes of Wicked: For Good.

Instead, perhaps a moderate hike in the eighty-degree sunshine? Some time with our current jigsaw puzzle. A discussion of our current two-person book club selection—Tender is the Night?