We’re a little over a month away from my favorite holiday of the year- Thanksgiving! We usually host a crowd of at least 15 and sometimes more than 20. I just checked my Thanksgiving folder on Google drive and it looks like we’ve hosted all but 3 of them since 2006!
It’s usually about now that I open that folder and pull up the menu from last year and begin deciding what to keep and what to change. I send out the email to invite folks. I think about the prep schedule and how we can show gratitude before we dive into the food. I think about the table and how I’ll decorate it. This year, will, of course, be quite different.
We had a run-through of a different version of a family holiday back in the spring for our Passover seder. We had five different households on Zoom and each got a turn to help re-tell the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt. It was odd but we made it work. The pandemic was more novel then and we naively thought we’d be sheltering-in-place for just a few months and then we’d get back to ‘normal.’
It is time to think about what our 2020 version of Thanksgiving will look like as we certainly won’t have 15 or more folks at our dining room table this year. I’m sure we’ll come up with a few good ideas to make it fun and meaningful and delicious.
Small local businesses are facing those same challenges. What can we do to make our work and offers, fun and meaningful and delicious? Have you come up with some good ideas?