This week as I’ve been agonizing over my covid-19 Thanksgiving plans, I’ve been reflecting on my ghosts of Thanksgiving past. I have such an enormous, close family that it can be easy for me to gloss through the surface of my holiday memories, recalling only the big joyful feast days where laughter, movies, and games vied with cracking nuts and singing around the piano with my mom and sisters, my dad abstaining because he believes you can sing in the key of “H.” These were the classic Americana Thanksgivings of my youth, where we might use the china my mom had accumulated piece by piece through a special promotion at the grocery story, or just pull out the paper plates because we had more guests than dishes.

I gave my children as many of these Thanksgivings as I could manage, but holidays wear many kinds of faces, and if I am to be honest I must steer clear of setting a Norman Rockwell snapshot as the gold standard, and therefore predispose myself to a long face when the unwanted pulls up a chair. In this time of covid, it might be best to approach the holidays as a new adventure, and decide ahead of time that we will enjoy it, no matter what it looks like. I’ve actually had a lot of practice at this.

Because we were out of sync with the rest of the population, Thanksgiving in China was generally a bit off-kilter. “Cranberries? We don’t know what is ‘cranberries?’” And turkey . . . have you ever seen a turkey in a wok? Neither have the Chinese people.

Our first Chinese Thanksgiving found us traveling in Shenzhen to tour factories, and when we’d finished our morning looking over printing capacity and acetate thickness, the owner steered us to a Brazilian restaurant where we had our first taste of western food in a month. I have no idea what I would think if I were suddenly air dropped into that same restaurant today, but that day, starving for any menu that did not offer chicken feet, we were pretty sure a batch of caterwauling angels had flown through and dropped a vat of manna still sparking with heavenly glory.