Whose Side are You On?

In the Tree House: Whose Side are you on?

By: Samantha S. Daviss

Well the family gathering plans have begun, the turkey has been hand selected at the grocery store and placed in the deep freeze for safe keeping, the fine china has been dusted off, the silver polished, and the liquor cabinet re-stocked (to increase tolerance for all the family coming to town).

With excitement in the air about Thanksgiving, long-lost family members reuniting, and the traditional side dishes already decided upon, and split evenly amongst the family members to prepare and bring to the table…there is that one side dish that stands alone. This is the one dish that no one really enjoys eating or for that matter preparing; but it is an obligation, and a required fixture on the Thanksgiving table. The one that your mother’s mother created generations ago, and if it is not presented on the table for all to observe (and more than likely avoid), your grandmother’s uterus may as well be pulled from her gut and stomped on the floor, may God rest her soul.

In my family that one abhorrent dish is my grandmother’s cranberry salad. As a child I was forced to eat it, and I always thought everyone around me enjoyed it; because I would look around our dining room table and my entire family and guests were devouring this salad. For the longest time I thought “maybe there is something wrong with me, something wrong with my taste buds”…but as I’ve grown older, created my own family, and started my own traditions…I’ve realized that everyone ate my grandmother’s salad out of pure trepidation.

They would rather choke down that salad, than tell her the truth, and reap the repercussions of her wrath. So now I’m realizing that my taste buds weren’t that far off the radar. At first bite you taste the Jell-o that encased the finely chopped cranberries, in addition to the dreadful flavoring of all the various citrus rinds that are mixed in the creation. But the presentation of this formation was always so lovely, making you doubt yourself as to why year after year this particular combination brought back such horrid memories.

It is gingerly placed on the salad plate from your fine china collection, atop a freshly washed, freshly peeled leaf of Iceberg lettuce. Therefore, sitting there all alone, being avoided by every patron at the table, you begin to feel sorry for this creation…and then you take a bite. And all those long past holidays spent together with the pinching of the cheeks from Auntie Sally, and the yelling over the roar of the football game, and the excitement of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, come flooding back into your memory bank; but nonetheless it does not enhance the feeling you get when you bite into this wiggly repulsive combination of flavors.

And you take another bite, only to make your mother happy that the tradition of grandma’s cranberry salad lives on. Viva la Cranberry!

Sadly though, the existence of this salad will continue to live on in my family and on our Thanksgiving Day table as a sign of respect for my grandmother, my mother, and the generations to come that must suffer through the same nauseating combination of cranberries, citrus rinds and gelatin that is the one symbol that represents the presence of those gone before us, and dining with us at our annual Thanksgiving feast.