Few of my Thanksgivings as a grown woman have been spent with immediate family. My parents are long gone and my brother lives in a different part of the country, so over the years I’ve experimented with how to spend the day. Often I have no idea where I’ll end up, or with whom, until the holiday has almost arrived. In the past, my mother always invited a “stray” to our family Thanksgiving table: an ex-girlfriend of my brother’s, a friend’s Spanish au pair, or the new hire at her favorite furniture showroom downtown. As a child, I sometimes resented her attentiveness to a stranger.
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