A comforting thought amid the holiday prep stress

This week, the Daily Tip is offering advice on how to approach this strange holiday time.

🦃 Today’s tip: Abandon the idea of the “perfect Thanksgiving” — it was always a lie, anyway.

Okay, stop for a moment. Step away from the magazine spread of perfectly burnished turkeys and pastry-autumn-leaf-adorned pies. Stop scrolling Instagram’s catalog of windswept and unstressed extended families frolicking amid foliage.

And let Livia Gershon set you straight about our aspirational modern version of this holiday: “While Thanksgiving has changed a lot over the decades,” she pronounced in Forge, “it’s always been a complicated, angsty affair.” Gershon explains that the perfect-looking turkey is a myth, gratitude is overrated, “traditional” dishes are a marketing scam, and of course the holiday’s origin story is rotten.

This year a lot of our traditions simply aren’t going to be safe. One upside, though, is that it’s a good year to cherry-pick the aspects of the holiday that really matter to you, and skip the rest. Most importantly, as Gershon writes: “Consider this your permission to cut out what might arguably be the most long-standing Thanksgiving tradition of all: stressing out about getting it right.”

📚 More from Forge on holiday traditions to ditch this year:

The Kind Way to Cancel Your Thanksgiving Plans
Read more >>

A Thought Exercise to Help You Make Peace With Busted Plans
Read more >>

Zoom Thanksgiving May Be the Best Thing You Do in 2020
Read more >>

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