For a long time, I celebrated Friendsgiving without even knowing it. It’s something that just sort of happened. When me and my folks, in Houston, made our obligatory neighborhood run-around in the days before Thanksgiving, we’d bring friends platters of turkey and stuffing and macaroni out of politeness and tradition, knowing all the while that the real spread was back home. We played the hits from the compulsory holiday menu for everyone else, but the food we cooked for our closest people was generally Jamaican: all fricasséed chicken and fritters and oxtail and ham choy. One year, on the weekend before Turkey Day, some Filipino buddies up the road brought their vat of pancit back to our place, along with Tupperwares lined with lumpia. Another family friend, from Iran, hauled two whole stuffed fish alongside yogurt rice with chicken. And then we had our Spanish neighbors, with their beef empanadas, and our Cajun neighbors, with their gumbo—and Thanksgiving followed, a few days later, with all of its attendant baggage, but that meal was always just a little bit lighter.
And so Friendsgiving became, in my life, more or less, the calm surrounding an inevitable storm. The new holiday reinforced a notion that the Venn diagram between the meal you want to have and the one you think you should have hardly ever intersects. But, putting aside my personal experience, the holiday’s appearance in our wider popular lexicon seems more instantaneous than meteoric: one day, we just had Friendsgiving. We blinked and it was there.
Friendsgiving’s earliest usage, at least according to Merriam-Webster, seems to have been in 2007, denoting “an informal replacement for the holiday typically spent with family.” In 2011, Friendsgiving made a cameo on “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” and, around the same time, the practice began to inspire a constant stream of blog posts (“How to Throw Your Roommates the Friendsgiving They Deserve”) and polls (“Where Were You When You Heard About Friendsgiving?”) and edicts (“Is Friendsgiving the Denouement to Advanced Capitalism?”) and pronouncements (“Friendsgiving: How Millennials Are Killing an American Pastime”).
Also, no one seems to agree on what Friendsgiving actually, specifically entails. Sometimes there’s turkey and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the host cooks and sometimes he doesn’t. The only codified consistency is that the holiday doesn’t take place on Thanksgiving itself (maybe the week beforehand, maybe the week after)—although this, too, seems to be optional. The only set menu for Friendsgiving is the lack thereof. But, even if the holiday’s logistics vary, the feeling it engenders is largely universal: for some of us, Friendsgiving is a way to transform a holiday rooted in atrocity into something objectively less heinous. For some of us—queer folks, especially—Friendsgiving is as close to Thanksgiving as we’ve conjured for some time. Friendsgiving works for folks who’ve moved away from their families, spending the holidays in new cities. Friendsgiving works for folks unable to see their loved ones, for one reason or another. Friendsgiving works for folks on a low budget. Friendsgiving works on no budget. Sometimes, Friendsgiving is a choice to do better; and, sometimes, it’s a choice to simply do something else.
But what Friendsgiving looks like, in practice—or what it means, in theory—is really up to you. That’s what makes it beautiful. And I’m less interested in the argument that Thanksgiving turkey is objectively bad (I’ve had some good turkey) than the fact that choice is inherently better. It just is. I spent one Friendsgiving in the park with friends, huddled over homemade bánh mì stuffed with assorted leftover meats, and gas-station beer, and a buddy’s mother’s biryani, and some carnitas another friend scoped from the Fiesta up the road for, like, nine dollars. On another Friendsgiving, after a friend of mine broke up with his boyfriend, his sister and I—along with her apartment neighbors—settled into a sort of fish fry, topping the whole thing with a pecan pie sold by this older black lady up the block. There was a Friendsgiving where, stranded in New Orleans and alone for the holidays, I was invited next door by my neighbors, a young Honduran couple, apropos of nothing, and we ate pupusas on the back of their car with the grocery-store turkey I’d hitherto had no one to share with.
My affection for Friendsgiving shouldn’t be taken as a slam against Thanksgiving. I am not trying to start a war. I don’t care what you do with that holiday, which can be an important one for a litany of reasons, some more valid than others. Using the holiday as a catalyst for family memories can be a beautiful thing. A Black Thanksgiving can be a beautiful thing. When my mother asks to meet my boyfriend for Thanksgiving, for the very first time, that is a beautiful thing. But it is also, generally, a terrible fucking headache. And Friendsgiving is, I think, the antithesis of a headache: whoever comes along comes along. Whoever can show up does. Stress will literally kill you. Friendsgiving is stress-free.
For me, Friendsgiving comes down to the point of any given holiday: the people. The point of Friendsgiving is the people. Your people. Whatever they look like. Whatever that means to you.
You don’t have to agree with me. The point is that you do what’s right for you. But let’s be honest with ourselves, even if only for a moment: green-bean casserole is delicious, sure, but is it as delicious as the karaage your ex’s girlfriend requisitioned, last minute, from her visiting aunt, for your Friendsgiving dinner? Is Thanksgiving stuffing as delicious as Friendsgiving ogbono? Maybe. But also, and this is the important thing: maybe not. You could be eating carne asada for Friendsgiving. You could be eating bo ssäm for Friendsgiving. You could be eating kimchi-braised pork alongside biscuits for Friendsgiving. You could buy a whole Peking duck and demolish that with your people for Friendsgiving. You could be sipping wine as your hand-picked dinner partners ladle rice into nori for Friendsgiving. You and those same folks could eschew the whole Hallmark-holiday-film montage in favor of dan-dan noodles in your tiny apartment for Friendsgiving.
One November, about six years ago, I came back to my home town of Houston after a long time away. I didn’t have many friends left in the neighborhood. Thanksgiving night loomed with its accompanying anxieties. I spent the run-up to that dinner on the sofa, sweating the inevitable, until a few days before that Thursday dinner, when an acquaintance from a hookup app invited me to dinner. This was, he said, his Friendsgiving. I had no good reason not to go. So I met him at his apartment for dinner, which was really his brother’s apartment, and which hosted, really, a dinner cooked by various friends from their respective social revolutions. I had no ties to any of them. And yet here I was for the evening: a friend among friends. We ate fried turkey and green beans and crab Rangoon. Everything was entirely too greasy. We ran out of paper towels. It felt like a genuine holiday.
Friendsgiving Bánh Mì
This is what I bring to Friendsgiving. Friendsgiving should be easy. That means cooking everything that you can cook early, early. The protein for this should be whatever is easiest for you to make; I err toward jerk pork, because that’s just what I have on hand around late November. And I almost always have pickled carrots in my fridge. But you don’t have to use pork. Use turkey, if you have that. Use tofu. Buy a roast chicken from the store. Don’t let this stress you out. Relax.
Jerk Pork (after Enid Donaldson’s “The Real Taste of Jamaica”)
Ingredients
4 lbs. pork shoulder or tenderloin
1 onion (for seasoning)
2 bunches scallion (for seasoning)
4 cloves garlic (for seasoning)
2 tsp. thyme (for seasoning)
1 Scotch-bonnet pepper (for seasoning; take out the seeds)
5 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. ground pimento (allspice)
¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
¼ tsp. ground mace
1 tsp. black pepper
Directions
1. Season the pork with your onion, scallions, garlic, and thyme. Leave it for around 45 minutes, but no more than an hour.
2. Rub the pork with the salt, sugar, pimento, nutmeg, mace, and black pepper. Marinate it for at least 6 hours (or overnight, if you have time, but it’s fine if you don’t).
3. Set up your grill and barbecue your pork to preferred crispness, or put it in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes or so. After 20 minutes, lower the temperature to 275 degrees and cook slowly to preferred crispness. (If you’re using a good thermometer, it should read 145 degrees.)
4. Chop your pork into bite-size pieces.
Pickled Carrots (after Charles Phan’s “Vietnamese Home Cooking”)
Ingredients
¼ cup white vinegar
¼ cup sugar
¼ tsp. kosher salt
½ cup peeled and thinly sliced carrots
Directions
1. Dissolve the sugar and salt into the vinegar. Stir immediately afterward.
2. Add carrots to the mixture and let stand for 20 minutes. Dry the carrots before serving. (If you’re not using these immediately, they hold in the fridge for up to a week.)
Bánh Mì (after Jerry Mai’s “Street Food Vietnam”)
Ingredients
1 bread roll for each diner (ideally from your local Vietnamese market, but any baguette works)
Vietnamese butter (to spread)
Chicken-liver pâté (to spread)
1 Tbsp. hoisin sauce
1 cucumber, sliced into wedges
2 scallions, cut lengthwise
1 jalapeño, sliced
Cilantro, to taste
Chili sauce, to taste
Directions
1. Slice open your bread rolls lengthwise, but don’t cut them all the way through.
2. Spread butter and pâté generously on the bottom halves.
3. Place the pork on top.
4. Add cucumbers, scallions, jalapeño slices, and carrots.
5. Drizzle the sandwiches with hoisin sauce, cilantro, and chili sauce, to taste.
