Nothing Good Happens After 2 A.M.

nervousacid:

A few years ago, on this day, some friends had an idea: The best part of Thanksgiving, they said, was the pie. So what if, in lieu of a traditional dinner, everyone came over with their dish baked in the form of a pie instead? There would be turkey pies and vegetable pies and cranberry pies and pumpkin pies and potato pies and — I actually made this — a pie full of macaroni and cheese. What could go wrong!

Each individual plate at serving time was essentially a Franken-pie. It was like having a full pie on your plate, except that inside every slice, there was a totally different flavor profile. At first, the table was joyful, boisterous, convinced that we had actually pulled off the greatest Thanksgiving idea ever. But what happened after that is still kind of fuzzy. I woke up on a hard wood floor surrounded by everyone who was there. It looked like a Thanksgiving Day Jonestown massacre.

Spoiler alert: a pie hangover is not cute.

This year, I’m thankful to have friends with ideas, to know people who always want to find the more creative angle, to be surrounded by instigators who don’t accept that everything we know has to be one way only. I’m also thankful for the people who make it possible for a vegetarian without a family to enjoy a holiday that is basically about eating meat with your parents. Somewhere along the way, this tradition broke for me. But it’s cool now. We fixed it.