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.

OK, 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 the American 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 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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