Thanksgiving Without a Plan? How This Host Built a Friendsgiving Tradition

Hosting Thanksgiving for the first time was a challenge I never anticipated. I was living in a 750-square-foot apartment that didn’t have a kitchen table, let alone a dining room. I had no experience cooking a turkey or even baking a pie. Looking back, I often call that 2018 dinner “the miracle of Thanksgiving” because, honestly, I had no business hosting such a holiday. And yet, everything we needed for a full-blown feast appeared, from tables to the turkey itself.

Seven years later, this event has grown into an unexpected tradition for newcomers, locals, and several Louisville transplants. While it usually takes place at my home, I certainly can’t take all the credit for its success. Without the people who’ve accepted the invitation over the years, my Thanksgiving Day would look less like a celebration and more like me eating a pan of my great grandmother’s stuffing with just my husband.

We’ve had as few as six and as many as 27 guests at our Friendsgiving. Journalists from eight different Kentucky newsrooms have joined us, along with a variety of significant others and stray friends. Some of them include a nurse, an insurance professional, a bank manager, a manufacturing manager at GE Appliances, and a violinist with the Louisville Orchestra.

The people truly make this day for me, and the cast of characters looks different every year. It’s also vastly different from the family Thanksgivings I experienced growing up.

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I had a long chat with Juniper Owens, a mental health educator and co-founder of Bridge Counseling and Academy, about how rituals and traditions fit into our society. Cultures worldwide use holidays as a touchpoint for the passing of time.

“Everyone's story and situation is so different, and their needs around the ritual of the holiday are different,” Owens told me. “What's important is preserving the functions of the holiday and what that means to each person.”

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Holidays, Owens explained, can serve as emotional anchors and create a feeling of safety in an ever-changing world. At the same time, losing that anchor can cause a major emotional disruption. Preserving tradition is often difficult as couples marry, families grow, and grandparents die. Clinging to unrealistic expectations can create loneliness, jealousy, and depression.

But holidays don’t have to look the same year after year to preserve good feelings or the experience, she said. Sometimes, you just have to work with the resources you have in front of you.

I learned this firsthand in my mid-20s from a friend and former colleague, Carrie Seidman, a columnist at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. She made national news in 2019 for inviting the newspaper’s readers to Thanksgiving. All you had to do was call her ahead of time, and she’d give readers her home address and have a seat for them at her table.

Before her invitations became quite that bold, I attended two smaller Thanksgivings at her home on Lido Key in 2016 and 2017. A few colleagues were there, but really, it was the strangers I met that day that I remember most. In between the turkey and the pie, I spoke with a woman who worked with the creator of "The Muppets," Jim Henson, in the 1970s. I met a few people Carrie connected with through a reporting project on mental health. Her son and his friend, who moonlight as a jazz duo, played music for us after dinner.

Not traveling home for Thanksgiving felt unnatural at first, almost as if I was breaking a rule. My family understood that I couldn’t fly to my hometown of St. Louis from Florida for a single Thursday night when I had to work Thanksgiving Eve and Black Friday. I couldn’t shake the idea that I should be there.

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Without realizing it, I was wrestling with those emotional anchors Owens talked about. But as that first evening at Carrie's went on in 2016, I started to realize sharing a holiday with all these random, colorful, kind people was a blessing in its own way.

When I moved to Louisville in 2018 and found myself working Thanksgiving Eve and Black Friday again, I tried to make the most of it. Around this time, too, my cousins, brother, and I started coupling off, and my mom moved our annual Thanksgiving celebration to the weekend before the holiday to avoid other family conflicts.

Suddenly, how I spent the fourth Thursday in November was largely up to me.

My Turkey Day invitation isn’t quite as robust as Carrie’s blanket welcome to the city of Sarasota, but I like to say that our Thanksgiving takes “all strays with references.” Meaning my friends and colleagues can bring anyone to my house who they’d invite to their own.

When I started "gathering strays" for the first Thanksgiving in 2018, I didn’t promise them any more than a floor to sit on, a pan of my great grandmother’s stuffing, and some wine. I was stunned when former Courier Journal reporter Morgan Watkins and her husband solved my turkey problem. They ordered one from Nueske's Applewood Smoked Meat, and all we had to do was warm it in the oven.

Oddly enough, we had two ovens that year. At the time, Louisville Public Media's Ryan Van Velzer, who co-hosts this dinner with me every year, lived in my old apartment complex in the Highlands. Between both ovens, we could keep our potluck-style feast warm, and it grew into one heck of a spread with cheesy potatoes, braised butternut squash, eggplant Parmesan, and mashed potatoes. Ryan even carried a few small tables and chairs across the courtyard, so the 10 or so of us wouldn’t have to sit on the floor.

That year, former Courier Journal copy editor Isabelle D'Antonio brought our Thanksgiving its first “stray with a reference.” Her friend, Maggie Henriksen, had to work Black Friday at a local retail store and couldn't travel to her family in Michigan. Seven years later, Maggie has never missed one of our Thanksgivings. She’s also no longer a stranger. Over the past few years, we’ve become good friends.

So much so, she’s actually agreed to be my right-hand in terms of hosting this year. I had a moment earlier this fall when I wondered whether I should host Thanksgiving at all. Ryan, who now makes the most luscious spatchcock turkey, warned me months ago he and his wife were taking a one-year hiatus to spend Thanksgiving Day with his family. My husband, Conroy Delouche, who typically smokes a ham, is scheduled to work the night shift on WHAS.

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This time, I had a whole house, a large folding table, warming trays, serving ware, and plenty of chairs. But I was missing the turkey and three major players I usually depend on. Then, in a very full circle moment, Maggie offered to help me with anything but cooking the turkey. She also volunteered her boyfriend to run out for ice or anything else we might need that day.

A week or so later, Morgan, who’s spent the past couple Thanksgivings with family, offered to chip in a smoked turkey, just like they did in 2018. Her husband, who is a nurse, is also working the holiday, so she and I can wrangle the kitchen together.

As it always does, the rest began falling into place. Investigative editor Mandy McLaren has promised to bring a salad. Former Courier Journal reporter Tessa Duvall will be back for a fifth year with her drool-worthy sweet potato casserole. Divya Karthikeyan, previously with LPM, is putting an Indian twist on collard greens.

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Honestly, it’s not quite as surprising as that first “miracle of Thanksgiving,” but it reminded me about how Owens encourages anyone struggling with the holidays to work with what they have to enjoy the occasion.

What I have is a lot of great people around me here in Louisville — and for that, I’m truly thankful.