I'm sure I mention practically every year that Thanksgiving, more than any other holiday, has really varied over the years as to how and where we celebrate it. There have been short stretches where it seemed a legit tradition had been born, such as the stretch from 2005 to 2009 when Shobhit and I spent the day at home in Seattle, usually cooking a large Indian-food meal and with Barbara and Sachin joining us. But then, in 2010 Shobhit moved to New York and Barbara moved back to Spokane (very briefly, before then heading on to Arlington, Virginia) about a month apart. But a few years later, Shobhit and I started having Thanksgiving dinners with Faith at her place out in Palm Springs: we did this the four-year stretch between 2012 and 2015. 2016 was a return to our hosted dinner in Seattle, that time without Barbara but with Sachin, and also with Ivan, Danielle, Evan and Elden. The two years after that, Shobhit and I went to Gina and Beth's in Olympia for their small-scale Thanksgiving dinner with friends—and us.
2019 was back home again, that time with only Sachin joining us. Then, of course, 2020 was the pandemic—we didn't go anywhere and we had no guests. We traveled back to visit Faith again in both 2021 and 2023, with the year in between back home yet again, that time with only Danielle as our guest. We seem to host at home once every two or three years.
Last year was a return to Olympia, but with a majority of the family gathering at Gina and Beth's—something, as I recall, they did not intend to do but it kind of snowballed and we all just kind of defaulted to meeting there. There was even a bit of back and forth as to whether Shobhit and I should come down, but in the end we did. (Then, Dad and Sherri, who had been planning on attending, stayed home because they had just both been hit hard by a non-covid flu of some kind.)
I never even asked if Gina and Beth would be hosting Thanksgiving dinner again this year. I suspect they preferred not to, especially considering how often they do host for Christmas and Easter. I figured if they wanted to invite us, they would reach out—and they are already scheduled to come up for a day visit in Seattle on Sunday anyway. I still don't even know what they did yesterday. I'll probably find that out on Sunday. I debated asking if we could join Laney and Jessica for their plan to just go out for dinner at a buffet, but I'm glad I didn't; I think they would have preferred to keep it a family affair (theirs included Jessica's boyfriend Mike and his son), and I didn't realize they were going out at a restaurant in Bremerton. (In fact, because Laney was thinking Shobhit and I might be taking a ferry to where we went—we didn't—she texted me to say the ferries yesterday was super busy and making reservations was recommended.)
All of the above is to say: we celebrated Thanksgiving in a new location this year—Karen and Dave's second house up in Tulalip, which was custom-built in so many ways that it included pretty easily accommodating 9 guests (I'm not counting their daughter Anita as a guest; she doesn't live up there but she does have her own room there).
In fact, just the other day I did
some cataloguing and figured out that, since my records beginning in 1993 (that was the year I turned 17), Thanksgiving locations for myself over the years can be close to evenly divided into five categories: Olympia (6 times since 1993); Spokane (also 6 times, though the last one there was 2003); Seattle (10 times); Palm Springs (also 6 times, in this case beginning in 2012); and "Random Other Places" (also 6 times: Centralia in 1999; Wallace, Idaho in 2004; New York City in 2010; Los Angeles in 2011; Phoenix in 2014—this year doubles with Palm Springs as we stopped at Faith's and had a separate Thanksgiving dinner there on our way to Phoenix from Los Angeles—and now Tulalip in 2025). I don't want to be presumptuous, but I wouldn't mind just continuing to go to Tulalip for Thanksgiving for the foreseeable future. If we go there again, I'll have to create a separate category for that location.
I usually do this for family gatherings, but I think I'll still go through a . . . Thanksgiving Roll Call!
1. Karen—friend I've known since we met in Hindi class in 2005, so, 20 years now! I was barely still in my 20s when we met and she was in her late forties. Now
I'm in my late forties and Karen is in her late sixties. Well, she just turned 67 last month. Karen is a wheelchair user who owns her own practice as a disability consultant for new construction projects. She also shared Wedding Planner duties with Sachin when Shobhit and I got married in 2013.
2. Dave—Karen's husband, apparently turning 75 next month. I have long known that he volunteers as a mechanic at the Center for Wooden Boats, but I only learned yesterday that Dave
also owns his business—as a boat mechanic. He says he doesn't do much of it these days, but I can imagine him having been very busy with it in his time.
3. Anita—Karen and Dave's daughter, also a wheelchair user, and Indian-American, having been adopted from India. Her and Karen both being wheelchair users is very relevant to the custom design of this house they had built in Tulalip, as it goes far beyond ADA compliance and is designed fully to their needs and even to their convenience. Anita was little when I first met her; she was at our wedding as a teenager; and I still struggle not to think of her as a kid, even though, if I remember right, she's about to turn 29 next month. She actually teaches as a profession. Or, at least she did; I think there was a recent change. This never came up yesterday.
4. Alice—Dave's sister. I learned yesterday she is only a year and two weeks younger than Dave. When I asked Dave at one point if he had any other siblings, he mock-whispered to me:
She is more than enough! To be clear, they seem to be quite fond of each other and get along well, which they apparently always did (I did ask). Karen gave us all assigned seating at the dinner table, clearly being careful not to seat any couples right next to each other. Alice was directly to my right. She ordered and brought the two centerpieces and they were lovely.
5. Diane—who would, I suppose, be considered Karen's best friend, although I don't think she's ever referred to her that way. Karen and Diane both have OI (
osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic bone condition that cause brittleness in the bones, and in both Karen's and Diane's cases, are why they are little people—though Diane is not a wheelchair user. Anyway, they met at a medical center and Karen introduced herself because Diane's father, a leading voice in some medical context I can't remember now, was familiar to her. Diane is a big part of Karen's life and I think she's been coming to their Thanksgivings for many years. Karen also brought Diane as her "plus-one" to
our wedding. Diane had brown hair then and it's pretty much solid white now.
6. Charlotte—Diane's daughter, also adopted!
And also a wheelchair user! Charlotte came from China, and was also adopted as a little girl, but I just learned yesterday that she's now 18. This made me think she must be about to graduate high school, but I was told: nope, she's still in the 11th grade and probably won't graduate for two or three more years. I had some trouble following the math there but decided not to press it, as it likely has to do with something that is really none of my business. Diane adopted Charlotte as a single parent.
7. Sanjay—a good friend of Karen's, who is also a very good cook, and who is a photography enthusiast, who was nearly the one we hired to be our wedding photographer in 2013—something I had long forgotten about until seeing him for the first time in ages yesterday. It even took me a little while to remember him; he remembered me immediately, of course. Shobhit did not like Sanjay's protectiveness of the original photo files, though, so we found another photographer who could offer a contract more to his liking. Another thing I had forgotten, though, was that for a few years there, Sanjay had his own street food vendor business, and we would see him and his wife occasionally at the Capitol Hill Farmers Market. He gave up on that business many years ago now, apparently. He still brought a sweet potato dish that the people who ate it loved (I didn't even touch it, I don't care for yams);
and he brought homemade chai—something I had also offered to do, but Karen told us we should just stick with the samoas. She later noted that another guest was bringin the chai. And the chai was very different from ours, more of a spicy kick to it (lots of people put black pepper in it; we don't), but still delicious. I just should have had my cup of it earlier in the evening. It fucked me up, keeping me awake truly almost the entire night. I did not get any more than three hours of sleep at a stretch, probably no more than five or six hours total, and none of it deep. I'm going to zonk out early tonight, I'm sure of it. Shobhit had
three cups of chai and he still slept like a baby! What the hell is wrong with him? Charlotte never got any of the chai, and when she found out Shobhit had drank three cups of it, she came over to him and tried to
stare him down, having no idea how little he would care.
8. Cheryl—Sanjay's wife. I talked a lot with her about their recent trip to Japan and Tokyo. I also learned that she has been volunteering as an ESL (English as a Second Language—
not Electronic Shelf Tags as they are currently known as at my job) for a very well-funded organization based in Bellevue.
9. Amelia—Sanjay and Cheryl's daughter. Also adopted! Also from India! (Sanjay is Indian; Cheryl is not—she grew up in Hawaii and one parent is of Japanese descent and the other of Chinese descent). These are the common threads with most of Karen's friends: either wheelchair users, or of South Asian descent, or families with adopted children (or all three, as in the case of Anita). This, really, is ultimately the way Karen and I connected as well: having a loved one who is from India, and trying to learn their native language. Neither Karen nor I ever really succeeded at that, but we tried for a couple of years! I do have a degrees-of-separation connection to the adoption aspect too, though: I was not adopted, nor have I adopted any children. But I was still in a family with someone adopted as a child, that being my mother. So, I grew up hearing certain stories about what that was like, and at different times, one time each in fact, I did meet each of Mom's biological siblings, who had been spread out each to different families: Uncle Chris, who I met one time in 1986; Uncle Terry, who I met one time in 1992; and Aunt Cyndi, who I met one time in 2017. Anyway, back to Amelia: she is
tiny, and very short (though not a little person), and could thus easily pass for a teenager, except for how she dresses and carries herself. I didn't talk to her a whole lot compared to others, but she was at the table seat next to me on the opposite side from Alice. She also arranged her many tiny ducks, which were part of a scavenger hunt of Charlotte's design,
into a lovely little heart.
10. Shelton—this is a longtime friend and colleague of Karens, someone she's known longer than she's known Dave. I had never met a person named Shelton before. "Shelton is where my dad was born and raised," I told him. I already have so many photos with the tag "Shelton" from my many visits there over the years that I had to improvise a bit for a unique tag to give him on the photos I got yesterday. Those I tagged with "shelton the man." Well anyway, Shelton the Man brought a "chess pie" with a kind of lemon custard filling that was so delicious I almost died.
11. Shobhit—my husband. You know him well. If you don't, just read about a hundred of my posts in this blog from the past year or so.
12. Me! Matthew. The one and only.
Should I count Kiki? Kiki would make 13 actually. But, Kiki did not have a place at the dinner table. Kiki also has a disability, by the way. One of her hind legs is not really functional. This does nothing to stop her from jumping up onto furniture, mind you.
Anyway, going through that list of attendees at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, I realized something that did not fully register until now: we have a long history with the majority of the people there, at least since 2013 or so. Karen already assured me there was plenty of space for us when she said the table seats 12 and we would take the group up to 12 people, so it would still be perfectly comfortable. I had told her over our Zoom lunch last week that we didn't know yet what we were doing for Thanksgiving, and that was when she immediately invited us. So it would still be a stretch to say that we did anything akin to "crashing their party," and yet, registering how long we have known at least 7 of the other 10 people, that makes it feel even less like we did.
The invite was for 3:00. and because the GPS estimate was starting to get longer the closer we got, Shobhit and I decided to leave at 1:50. It was 2:00 by the time we were driving down Pine Street toward the freeway, and then we made such good time that we pulled up to the house in Tulalip, it was only 2:45.
Alice, Diane, and Charlotte were already there though. In fact, because Charlotte was setting up this scavenger hunt game searching for tiny ducks, we had to wait a minute in Karen's office room in the back of the house, the exterior door to which was what Dave brought us through. Alice was already in there, but within just a couple of minutes we were told the coast was clear.
Charlotte had three prizes for people, and she had slightly complicated rules for who would win them. Grand prize went to the person who found the most ducks; I guess second prize went to who found the most ducks
and found one of three even tinier plastic turtles. I only found three ducks, but I found one of the turtles, which netted me a prize: a
tech organizing pouch for a smartphone and its accoutrement, like chargers, AirPods, cords, etc. I found the hot pink color to be a bit on the nose, but I
did choose it: Anita found the most ducks, something like 25, so she got to choose the first prize, taking the blanket. Amelia found 20 ducks (all of which were arranged into the aforementioned heart), but I had found a turtle, so I got to choose between the other two prizes. Amelia got the last choice: an "emergency kit," although it proved to be just slightly more exciting than the expected Band-Aids and other minor medical supplies—instead, it was filled with toiletries, like toothbrushes and other similar items.
Shobhit's samosas went over predictably very well. We set them out on the appetizer / snack table, but we grabbed a couple each for our main plate as well: dinner was served buffet style, taking our plates back to the table. I had plenty to eat, though it was pretty low in protein: salad, dinner rolls, green beans with crispy onions, samosas, mashed potatoes—which Alice took care not to make with any stock, let alone meat stock, for Shobhit's and my sake. Funny that there were three South Asians there but Shobhit and I were the only vegetarians in attendance.
Once we all sat down and before we dug in, Karen made a little speech about acknowledging the parents who are now gone for the first time at Thanksgiving. I figured she was referring to multiple people, though I couldn't remember exactly how long ago it was that Karen's dad passed away. Was it before Thanksgiving last year? I suspect it was. Anyway, because Karen wasn't being specific about it, Diane shared that her dad passed away that very morning. That was a minor jolt of a thing to hear, but she noted that he had been in hospice, so even though it happened more quickly than they expected, it was still expected. I have no idea how close Diane was with her father but she seemed to be handling it well. Not that there's any judgment to how any person handles the death of a loved one. Clearly she wanted to stick with the plan of spending the holiday with this group of people.
And then, just before we started eating, I took the requisite group selfie. Sanjay was actually about to set up his tripod to set the timer and take a picture, but Cheryl seemed to think it was taking too long, and that was when I piped up that I'm good at taking group selfies. Not that the photo I got is some kind of masterpiece or anything. But, between you and me, I hate having to wait for someone else who has taken a photo to get around to sending it to me. I process my photos as soon as I get home in most cases, and I give them dated and numbered file names so they automatically sort in chronological order. Having to wait around for other people's photos complicates that process. I have a system, dammit!
We were there a good six hours or so. Karen had said we would play games around the time we all had dessert, but general visiting precluded any gaming. We were headed out by about 8:45, right after I did hand my phone to Sanjay and ask him to take a photo of Shobhit and me with Karen and Dave, and I think that photo turned out quite well indeed.
We might have hung out a little while longer, but Shobhit and I had one more stop before we headed south again:
Tulalip Lights & Ice at the Tulalip Casino. We actually went to this once before, with Alexia, two years ago. It's very cool and elaborate, but at the time I basically thought I was scratching it off my list and would never feel a particular need to go back to it again. I had no idea I would have a friend build a house nine miles from there—we were that close, why wouldn't we go back again? (Will we go a third time if we go to Karen's in Tulalip for Thanksgiving again? Honestly, probably yes.)
I took 35 photos at the house yesterday, although my
Thanksgiving 2025 photo album contains 48 shots this year—the most
since 2010, when Shobhit and I attended the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York—because of the 12 shots taken of samosa prep and other things the couple days before; then I added just one shot from Tulalip Lights & Ice to the end, since it was still Thanksgiving Day when we went. But otherwise, I took 41 shots at Tulalip Lights & Ice, which is why they get
their own dedicated photo album.
We got there at about 8:55, parking at 9:00, and we left at 9:35. So I spent 40 minutes taking the photos I took at Tulalip Casino. It then took us about 45 minutes to drive home. I spent time processing photos, easy to do since I was
wide awake. The whole day today so far has been slightly off kilter, as I feel very sleep deprived. I look forward to a night of sound sleeping tonight. We didn't have any chai today.
[posted 3:23pm]
