holiday dinner prompts + fizzy cheer
THE BRIDGE IS BACK, SUBURBIA —
if i may, let’s start with a gentle reminder: if you’re home for the holidays, you are lucky. and if you’re happy about it, you are even luckier.
thanksgiving kicks off a time of the year that can be hard, happy, or somewhere in between for almost all of us. we can only know where we fit on that range, and it is ignorant to assume a cookie cutter similarity for those around us.
nuance in mind, today i’ll speak from where i’m at. i’m home after a while away, and i’m thankful for both the friction and the family that comes with my return. i’m also struggling to take that thankfulness beyond my journal or this newsletter or my head and transfer it into conversations with the people i flew thousands of miles to see.
so if you’re in my boat, nice to have you, here’s some cheese. i’m going to try to bridge the aforementioned disconnect so we’re all prepped for thursday, and heck, the rest of this family-filled holiday season.
but before we get into the main course, my words + a thank you:
my words: low alcohol, alcohol is generating interest amid investors.
etc: you’d think by now i’d be used to the crazy stuff that raises venture capital money. i am not, and i used a lede that subtly references poop to share my surprise.
learning lessons: back to thankfulness, i’m going to miss working with alex, a lot. the story goes something like, while i was an intern at the sf chronicle i was told i’m going to co-host a podcast with crunchbase news. i came to the podcast studio (s/o king + owen + trisha) and met someone who talked as fast as i did: this guy named alex. i was thankful, and a bit shook how promptly he ended up becoming one of the best hearts i’ve met in this business. alex was so great that i begged him to let me work for him, and well, we all know how it worked out. thanks for everything, a.
anyways
so i take that if you’re still reading this, you also want to swap your entitlement for some damn gratitude. extra gravy if the gratitude is the kind that others can feel, too.
to do so, let’s ditch our phones, stop binging A Million Little Things, and set aside some time to talk to the people we travelled to see. better yet, let’s talk about more than the very surface level three W’s (work, weather, or what you’d low key add to this mashed potatoes to make it slap).
with no further ado, some prompts to whip out during holiday dinners to get deep, fast:
interview your family on, well, everything. riffing off of an episode of master of none, i think unpacking the small stories of your parents is insightful as heck. ask about their first heart break. how they met. a funny anecdote from their respective childhoods. a holiday tradition they miss. their college friend group dynamics. think of it as a friendly interview, not small talk! not only will you walk away with a deeper understanding of your parents, but you may just find bits of yourself in the stories. bits you never knew you had in common with them. (for ex, my mom ate avocado a ton when she was pregnant with me. i found that out about two years ago, and well, this happened).
a good ol’ PG13 game of “either, or?” someone picks two options, and on the count of three, everyone at the table puts up one finger or two. let’s play a scenario. think appropriate though, like would you either eat peanut butter for the rest of your life, or eat jelly or would you either have fingers for toes or toes for fingers. you may just walk away with a randomly deep connection with your third cousin’s friend that showed up.
rose, bud, thorn for years, i’ve done this exercise with friends overdue for catch ups. one by one, everyone goes through their individual stories. rose: something good that happened to you recently. bud: something you’re working on or looking forward to. thorn: something you’ve been struggling with recently. i think it’s really hard to include the three w’s in any of these answers, so it passes my test.
and that’s a taste of the prep work i think it takes to dive deep this holiday season. best of luck to the luckiest of us.
to vegetarian side dishes that are stars by nature,
n
my coffee and bagel shop
header photo by Hai Nguyen on Unsplash