Food, Football & Fun

Thanksgiving is a great time to observe your family and the different gender roles they fall into. Our Thanksgiving is spent with our neighbors who we consider part of the family. Cooking usually begins the day before. My sister and I go next door to help with the bulk of the meal, the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mashed carrots, parsnips, turnips, you know the works. I don't think anyone would be surprised to hear that my sister and I helped our female neighbor (she is like an aunt to us) with these preparations. Meanwhile, our mother was next door pealing and slicing a bundle of golden delicious for some good old homemade apple pie. Our father isn't around for the festivities that go along with preparation, because his excuse is his work comes when the turkey needs to be carved. Strenuous work that must be, if it is the equivalent to how much the rest of the laborers in the kitchen do. So Thanksgiving morning rolls around, and after a very disappointing Macy's Day Parade, we start getting everything in the oven. My sister and I were also involuntarily chosen (though I'm not complaining) to polish the silver, set the table, and serve the hors d'oeuvres (your basic three-cheese and cracker platter with some healthy fruity wines on the side). I can't say if those chores are attributed to the fact that we are the only children. I often wonder the way chores would be distributed if there was a male sibling in the mix. And sadly, I will never fully understand the inner-workings of the Hatch family. Anyways, our other neighbor who joined us for Thanksgiving dinner is a vegetarian, so he brought over some vegan spinach casserole. Throughout the day (before, during and after dinner), three football games known as the Turkey Bowl are on. My dad and our neighbor watched the games on and off all day. I was just interested in watching the pats, cowboys and get crushed by the various opponents. After appetizers and dinner, the ladies would clean up while the adult males would return to glue their faces to the television. When delicious apple and pumpkin pies were devoured, we played some goofy games of Apples to Apples, Cranium, and all those other games that make you mad at the members of your family (in a good way of course). In all the games we played, you could see the gendered answers. It was neat to see what was honorable or breath-taking to a woman as opposed to a man's answers (referencing Apples to Apples). Our neighbor was an artist who had the amazing opportunity to live in Italy for a few years and study art there. This kind of threw a monkey wrench into your stereotypical male answers. I recall a the adjective being "beautiful" and my dad put something down along the lines of reliable technology (engineer nerd). My mom and sister had things like rainbows and waterfalls. Our neighbor put down Michelangelo (flaunting his intelligence by adding the rest of his name "di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni") obviously influenced more by his history in Italy than his Y chromosome. It is always interesting to go home and see how apparent the gender roles really are in my house after taking this course for a while now.