As the country’s busiest national holiday almost 400 years after its first celebration, Thanksgiving is more than a celebration of friends and family. It’s traditionally an opportunity to welcome in both our neighbors and passing strangers to share food, stories and recipes.
This year will be unlike nearly any other in our nation’s history as families and friends remain apart to adhere to COVID-19 mitigation guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Local restaurants, such as Coffee Pot Restaurant in Sedona and Georgie’s Café in Cottonwood, usually host an annual free community meal, as do the Bread of Life Community in Camp Verde and the Sedona Elks Lodge the week of Thanksgiving.
This year, those sit-down dinners have been canceled. We thank those who have hosted, sponsored, served and attended these dinners in past years and hope that we can return to a semblance of normalcy in 2021.
Some nonprofit charities offer residents the opportunity to pick up dinners or whole turkeys, but even with that generous donation, meal-sharing is still central to the holiday.
My staff and I work Wednesday and Friday the week of Thanksgiving, so traveling to see extended family out of the area on just Thursday is nearly always out of the question, unless our family lives in the Verde Valley or less than a day’s drive within the state.
Thus, I have always attended at least one of these free dinners to enjoy being around my friends and neighbors and avoid the hassle of cooking. For me and many others, the dinners were our one and only Thanksgiving meal.
At Coffee Pot Restaurant on Wednesday, the Daher family, the restaurant’s staff and the employees’ children traditionally give back to a community that supports them during the rest of the year, with any money collected going into direct donations to the Sedona Community Food Bank.
The Dahers informed us earlier in the month that they would not be hosting the dinner this year. The spacing requirements to maintain safe distance between diners would make serving all the prospective customers troublesome and only doing to-go orders in the parking lot would likely cause a major traffic backup in both directions along State Route 89A.
Instead, the Dahers will be collecting donations to present the Sedona Community Food Bank and urge others who would normally go to the dinner to make direct donations to the food bank.
Events like big community Thanksgiving dinners generally go a long way to remind us that our community is a lot smaller and closer knit than we often think, something we especially need this year as our fractured nation deals with the aftermath of one of the most contentious elections in our history.
Our nation has been split almost in half with two loud factions in echo chambers, hearing only what they want and refusing intentionally or by accident to hear from the other side. It predated the recent administration, but will only improve if we make a conscious effort to heal the rift.
We need to be able to look at each other and realize that behind the Biden/Harris pin or underneath the MAGA hat, or whether we supported the astronaut or the fighter pilot, we’re Verde Valley residents who shop at the same grocery stores, drive the same residential streets and have kids or grandkids who play on the same playgrounds. We enjoy a hearty meal, good conversation and feeling part of a group doing good works for our community. The goal is to keep that feeling not only through the holidays, but all year long and until next Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving isn’t about the food, it’s about being a part of a sincerely thankful community and we should remember that even as we dine apart this year.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
