How much jello salad can 200 people eat in an hour?
Dinner is a different experience when you eat with (literally) half the town
Like every other newsletter writer in the United States, I intended to write a post for Thanksgiving. In the attention culture of the 2023 internet, publishing a Thanksgiving post on December 4 feels like it has all the timeliness of writing about the moon landing.
But…I couldn’t articulate what I wanted to say about Thanksgiving. I chose to bake my feelings and make a bunch of desserts that week instead of writing this. I do have something to say, though, so pull out the pumpkin spice one last time and let’s get on with it.
In my rural Iowa town in the 1980s and 1990s, Thanksgiving wasn’t a family-only celebration. It was a large community dinner, created and hosted by my grandparents, bringing close to 200 people together every Thanksgiving Day. This is a large dinner anywhere — but in a town with a population of less than 500, it feels massive.
The tradition started before I was born. Sometime in the 1970s, at a family Thanksgiving dinner, my grandparents started talking about all the people who didn’t have anywhere to go for the holiday or couldn’t afford a meal. I’m sure it devolved into some discussion of various family trees, as most of our meals usually do. The next year, my grandparents hosted a free Thanksgiving dinner for anyone who wanted to come. By the time I was old enough to participate, these meals had grown tremendously. Throughout my childhood, we hosted them annually in the main community building in town.
In other cities I’ve lived in, like San Francisco or Denver, community centers are pretty nice. I’ve been to weddings, concerts, and charity galas in community centers. There are caterers, florists, bartenders, rented linens, and coat checks.
My hometown’s community center is something else.
The community building is one of the largest indoor spaces in the county. The entryway has one set of opaque white double doors, two bathrooms, and the entrance to the town library, which is open a couple of hours a week. The walls are covered in photos from previous community gatherings, all of which were larger than what we do today.
The main room is through another set of double doors. It is a vast empty space perfect for roller skating, which I sometimes did as a kid. The floor is concrete. Insulation and ductwork are completely exposed in the high ceiling that curves over the room. Long tubes of fluorescent lights are mounted to the support beams. The space feels industrial and a little harsh, which is compounded in winter by an ever-present chill.
The walls are finished in a hodgepodge of styles. Some are paneled. Some are painted brown from floor to mid-level, and then white to the ceiling. There are garage doors on the east side, mostly kept closed. One wall is made of cinder blocks, partially obscured by sheets of painted plywood. This wall separates the main community space from the volunteer fire department, whose garage is built into the north end of the building.
There are a few bleachers in the back, as well as stacks of tables and folding chairs which can be set up and torn down for events. To my knowledge, there has never been a ticketed coat check at any event — there are metal racks with old wire hangers for anyone to use, or people throw coats into piles on the bleachers. The kitchen is big enough for ten or twenty people to work in, with a pass-through window for events where concessions are sold. There’s also an old piano and a stage along the south end, which is used for the annual community play.
I’ve mentioned in other posts that buildings here are often moved and reused. The community building was moved here in the 1970s from a more prosperous town a hundred miles away that wanted rid of it. A bunch of local residents raised the funds to buy it, tear it down, haul it here, pour a new concrete floor, and reassemble the building piece by piece. Waste not want not, even when it comes to municipal buildings. Other than the occasional repairs, it hasn’t been updated in fifty years.
I spent a lot of childhood meals in this building — putting up and taking down tables and chairs, fetching things, pouring drinks, or hiding with a book to avoid the adults who wanted to put me to work.
Thanksgiving dinners were particularly intense. My grandma was a powerhouse when it came to organizing meals. She made sure there was enough turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, and gravy for 200 people, cooking some of it herself and arranging volunteers to cook the rest. We always had five-gallon orange coolers of unsweetened iced tea and lemonade, and big metal urns of weak Folgers or Maxwell House coffee. Grandma also organized the pies — dozens and dozens of them, made by volunteers, in every flavor from pumpkin to chocolate meringue to coconut cream.
Everything else was potluck. People were responsible for bringing their own dishes and utensils. They could bring a side dish of some kind, and most people did. The food stretched across four or five long tables, with every “salad” you can imagine (and many that you can’t), as well as roasting pans full of meat and potatoes.
The meal always started at noon. In our community building, everyone knows exactly when it’s noon. The town’s tornado siren is mounted on top of the building, and for reasons I don’t know, it has always blown a daily “noon whistle.”
So, when the noon whistle went off, it drowned out all conversation, and the kids covered their ears until it was done. Then my grandfather would get on stage and say a few words to welcome everyone before giving the blessing. Everyone lined up, got their food, and sat at long rows of tables, chatting with their neighbors. Antsy kids ran around and clambered on the stage or bleachers. And people hung out through the afternoon, cleaning up the kitchen and putting away the tables and chairs that we’d set up earlier in the day.
As far as I know, no one ever got food poisoning from the potluck — but I was burned a couple of times when I took what looked like scalloped potatoes (potatoes au gratin if you’re fancy) and found out it was scalloped cabbage instead. There was always enough food, although the good pies went fast. And my dad and uncle often packed up plates of food to take to elderly residents in town who couldn’t get to the community center but were in need of a meal and a friendly hello.
Looking back, I’m charmed by those dinners. I remember my grandma in her striped denim kitchen apron, wielding a big metal spoon, almost too short to see over the giant pots of potatoes boiling on the stove. I remember the care my grandfather took in writing down what he wanted to say to the community, keeping his notes on a yellow legal pad.
I remember how it felt like this was how Thanksgiving should be, would always be — not knowing, when I was little, that it was an incredibly rare gathering.
My grandparents are gone now, but people still mention their Thanksgiving dinners to me. The community Thanksgiving dinner has mostly continued — other community members have kept it alive, in varying formats. My family no longer goes every year, although we sometimes stop in. No one’s gravy is as good as my grandma’s anyway.
But the part I’m having trouble articulating is that there was a period, in high school and especially in some of my adulthood, when this whole thing seemed hokey. It seemed embarrassingly Americana. It seemed like something I could never even tell my city friends about.
I spent some adult Thanksgivings by a pool in Hawaii. I spent others eating vegetarian tofurkey in San Francisco. I would check in with my family after the meal to get whatever gossip they’d heard, but otherwise I pretended it didn’t exist.
Other years, I would have happy hour at a fancy cocktail bar before catching a red-eye to Iowa — and then find myself, a day later, in an underheated concrete and tin shell of a building, eating mystery jello beneath a fluorescent-lit American flag and trying to make sense of my two unrelated worlds.
Now, I’m embarrassed that I was embarrassed, which is a new pinnacle of unhelpfulness from the judgey side of my brain.
Part of me would still rather have a Thanksgiving piña colada instead of a pea salad of dubious provenance. Part of me wishes my hometown could afford a better community center — one that I could have held a wedding in without judgment from my bougie internal critic, if that had ever been on my list of things to do.
But part of me is proud that my town came together to build that community building, despite its quirks. It matters more to me, and to the town, than any of the nice venues in San Francisco ever did.
And part of me likes jello salad and strange casseroles and saying hi to every neighbor I’ve ever known, all in the same place.
I’m grateful that I grew up someplace where it feels important to live in a community, and that we are all in this together — even if I do, sometimes, feel like an outsider in my hometown despite the depth of my roots.
That, though, is a story for a different post.
Cheers,
Sara
In case you missed it…
The latest post (which includes how our family meals devolve into discussions about other people’s family trees):
An example of other buildings that have been moved / relocated around my small town area:
As an immigrant who came late in life to Thanksgiving, this sounds much more in the spirit than some of the bougier ones I have attended!
Recipe Club (the podcast) tackled the jello salad one time, for their Fourth of July episode, if memory serves. There was a real plot twist in there that had me laugh out loud in the car. But now I'm curious to hear what you think, whether it was handled with enough cultural sensitivity, especially in light of your latest post about farmland food desert.