Both sides of my family are big on get-togethers. Easter egg hunts. Memorial Day picnics. Combined family birthday parties broken down by month or season. Growing up, my family got together often, even when there wasn’t a holiday or excuse. My grandparents often dropped by our house after church on Sunday. One aunt worked at my high school down the street (she was actually my Spanish teacher for two years, a secret we kept from the class until the last day).

When I moved to New York in January 2007, I knew two people. Three if you include my boss, whom I had met once. My friend and former classmate Lindsey had helped me get the job and my cousin Kristin was going to grad school and helped me find my apartment. This was my circle. These were my people. I kept my fingers crossed I wouldn’t do anything to piss one of them off.

My cousin and I made a point of having little dates, because even though we both lived in Brooklyn, she was busy with grad school and my work schedule was unpredictable. One time we cooked dinner at her apartment while our families were together in Kansas City celebrating my sister’s 21st birthday. We sent picture messages across the country as we ate our dinner and questioned whether our parents were, gasp, drunk.

A couple months later, my cousin and I moved in together. We started making our own family traditions. For birthdays, we take the other one out to eat. At first, we went to TGIFriday’s because of our mutual love of honey mustard (and because it reminded me of home. Don’t judge. I really love chicken fingers and honey mustard). But we also have a mutual disgust for overpriced food and poor service, and started branching out. The birthday often ended with ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery.

Our first Easter as roommates found us compiling every family recipe we love and deciding we should make them all for our feast. Forget that we’re two girls instead of three families with eight hungry men. We baked three casseroles (pesto gnocchi, cheesy potato and green bean) and concocted multiple desserts. We took photographs to document this amazing feat to show our mothers. We enjoyed the food on our futon, resting all our dishes on the coffee table. (After 11 months, we still didn’t have a kitchen table.)

This year surprisingly found us back at TGIFriday’s. Kristin’s mom forwarded her a coupon from the restaurant for a $1 entree with the purchase of another entree. We weren’t quite up to the previous year’s Easter cook-a-thon, and we decided subjecting ourselves to the tourist trap chain restaurant was worth it for the “bargain” and honey mustard. The experience was pretty terrible, and the menu did not have one single vegetarian entree for Kristin. Even though she ordered the chicken pasta sans chicken, her food still arrived with meat on it. And when they brought a “new” dish out after a few minutes, she still found flecks of chicken in the pasta. But we had our fries. And we had our honey mustard.

It took some sub-par service and an overflowing sink full of dishes to learn that it’s not so much about what happens at a holiday gathering, but who’s keeping you company, that matters.

One Response to “Gather round the good stuff”

1. Alice Hill Says:
   April 24th, 2009 at 9:13 pm

   You make me homesick for the “old days”. You set your sights high, left hearth and home and “all those people” and an empty spot -

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