For a couple of days, it looked as though Martha Stewart, of all people, had given up on Thanksgiving. She announced her surrender on a television talk show (naturally), saying: “I gave up Thanksgiving. I canceled … nine guests canceled because somebody got sick. So, I called up my chef friend and I said, ‘We’re not doing Thanksgiving.’”

She has been “doing Thanksgiving” for a long time now, she went on, and has cooked a lot of turkeys.

“I think I probably cooked … 60 Thanksgivings at least, maybe more,” Stewart said in a 2020 interview. “Cause I got married when I was 19, and I did my first Thanksgiving … when I was 20 years old.”

And now, she said last week, she was “turkeyed out.”

Well, if it is too much for Martha Stewart, then what chance do the rest of us have?

Maybe, one thought ruefully, Thanksgiving is done. Maybe the last lines of the poem Randall Jarrell wrote on the death of the Baltimore Colts great defensive lineman “Big Daddy Lipscomb” came to mind:

The world won’t be the same without Big Daddy.
Or else it will be.

Maybe Thanksgiving would get along, one thought, without Martha Stewart there to tell us how to cook a turkey. And there was consolation in the fact that she wasn’t bailing for reasons of political correctness and an urge to preach to lesser, coarser souls. These days, Thanksgiving is disdained in some quarters as an insult to Native Americans. Something about the Pilgrims.

At which one thinks, wearily, “Okay, but that’s a long time to hold a grudge. Now let’s carve that bird and get after it.”

There is also, of course, a certain strain of snobbishness or elitism or whatever that disdains Thanksgiving because it is just too middle class and, well, American. This is not only because the turkey is native to North America. There is also the spirit of the day. It is an occasion of, well, thanksgiving. Of gratitude.

“For what?” one imagines certain soreheads asking as they lace up their boots in preparation for the protest march against some outrage or another.

Anyone asking the question will not be satisfied with any answer. “So what,” one would likely sneer on being told that the day was given a sort of presidential blessing by Abraham Lincoln in a time vastly darker than any modern-day Thanksgiving cynic has lived through.

If you don’t understand that you have reason to feel grateful, then no words will change your thinking. Not even if it is Lincoln proclaiming:

the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity [sic] and Union.

But … getting back to the turkey.

I wondered, on reading about Martha Stewart’s turkey fatigue, if she might have changed her mind had she dropped by my house one of those years when we were doing a wild turkey Cajun-style. I got pretty good at hunting the birds and cooking them in a tub of boiling hot grease. I could even do it without setting the house, or myself, on fire. The beauty of this method of cooking is that the turkey doesn’t dry out. That hot-oil bath seals everything. And since we are talking Cajun cooking here, you must have you some oyster dressing, which you cook in the oven and serve with slices of turkey spread with some gravy made with the turkey necks and gizzards and thickened with a roux. Some roasted yams do nice things as an accompaniment to the meal. And some green beans with some baby potatoes.

And you won’t go wrong if you have you some pecan pie for dessert.

A wild turkey is a bonus, but it’s not indispensable to a fine Thanksgiving dinner. You can cook a store-bought turkey in hot grease, same as you would a wild bird. And all the sides are the same. There are lots of possibilities.

The point is to make a feast of Thanksgiving. Not just dinner or supper or some ordinary meal. You have to lay it on. Too much isn’t necessarily enough.

When I was a kid, we would go to my grandparents’ house in a little Alabama town for Thanksgiving. The place was full of uncles and aunts and cousins, and the kitchen was going full tilt. There was always a bushel of oysters that the grown men were tasked with opening. There were three or four different salads that the kids were compelled to eat.

“Just two bites” was the negotiating stall.

And then two turkeys. One wild and one from the supermarket.

A venison roast.

Wild rice.

Asparagus casserole.

Green beans with almonds.

And on and on until you just couldn’t eat any more.

And then, it was on to desert.

You could choose your pie. Apple or pecan or sweet potato.

The point of the meal was, well, excess. We never fell short, and I never wondered about the point of Thanksgiving.

Still don’t.

And, now, with less than 40 hours left before I put match to charcoal and begin slow cooking my turkey on a water smoker, I heard news of Thanksgiving’s deliverance.

Seems Martha Stewart changed her mind.

She is, the New York Post reports, “gearing up to cook a ‘stuffed and roasted 20-pound organic, heritage bird’ as well as ‘prepping to bake thirty pies’ for the holiday.”

So there. Thanksgiving will not be denied.

Not even by Martha Stewart.