Thanksgiving Circle Game

During the ski school years, Thanksgiving was lost to us. Mostly.

We’d get together with other twenty-somethings if we could, friends from the ski area, fellow instructors, patrollers, lifties. And, assuming we had Thursday night off, we constituted a sort of substitute family. Nobody had time to cook, so our gatherings were more like impromptu parties where we might put together a baña calda: massive amounts of garlic and anchovies in hot oil; dip strips of cheap steak; retrieve. It was fun. It helped to be drunk.