We’ve all felt it – that little twinge of dread when you’re the new kid in class, or your friend walks away from you at a party, or you go out to the bar for the first time alone.
It was with that familiar twinge that I pulled up to an apartment building in Penacook on a dreary Saturday for my first official “Friendsgiving,” a celebration of friendship that’s meant to be a sidebar to the traditional family Thanksgiving.
Millennials like me are largely behind the growing popularity of Friendsgivings. Kory Stamper, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, said the phrase may make it into the dictionary, and businesses such as Royal Caribbean Cruises are beginning to cash in on the craze. While Americans have long celebrated Thanksgiving with friends when they couldn’t be with family, Friendsgivings aren’t usually replacements for traditional family gatherings.
The irony of this Friendsgiving – and the source of my dread – was that when I entered the apartment, I would be a stranger to all but one person. The invitation came from Alex, a friend from UNH who met the hosts, Erin and Kris, during a summer job. “They love the free press,” he texted me. “Feel free to bring a camera.”
It seemed like a simple task in theory, to go to a Friendsgiving and ask people what they thought about it. Yet as I walked in with my last-minute veggie plate for the potluck, I felt awkward. “When do I whip out my notepad and start taking notes?” I thought. “Should I introduce myself as a writer immediately, or will that dampen the mood? Will I make others feel uncomfortable?”
My fear subsided a bit when I realized I had actually met my hosts before, at a house-warming party in Manchester. They were, as they’d been before, very gracious.
“A veggie plate? Nice!” Erin said as she placed it on the table. Her apartment was big, and warm, and little Christmas lights twinkled from the porch. A cheery “Happy Thanksgiving” banner stretched across a doorway. “That was one thing I was thinking we would need. Thanks for bringing it!”
I appreciated the effort to put me at ease.
Some, I’m sure, would chalk up my anxiety (as well as the whole idea of Friendsgiving) to typical millennial behavior: always trying to “shake things up,” going outside the norm, not wanting to get our feelings hurt. But for some people, having a gathering outside of the normal family tradition can be a balm.
My friend Alex, who is gay and out to his friends but not all of his family, told me it was comforting to be himself around others after having to conceal some of who he is during the holiday.
“Here, everyone knows who I am,” he said.
And Erin noted that for those of us from New Hampshire who either grew up together or went to school together before moving away, the holidays are a time when we know the old crew might be around.
“We’ve always tried to come together around the holiday, but now instead of dorms or our parents’ house, we’re in our own place,” Erin said.
As more people started to arrive, I steadily munched my way through several iterations of cheese and crackers before Erin offered up a Hail Mary: “Does anyone wanna see our new cat?”
For awkward people at a party, an animal is a saving grace. As we sat on the bedroom closed off from the rest of the apartment, I found a brief reprieve in Nola, a 2-year-old tortoiseshell who indulged my need to scratch her ears while I listened to others talk.
There wasn’t much that divided us. While everyone else had met through Keene State College, we all were connected in the way only born-and-bred New Hampshire people can be: through nearby hometowns and work locations.
Beth was from Moultonboro, close to my hometown of Gilford, and had recently relocated to Newmarket, not far from where I had gone to school. Erin is a high school teacher at Bow, and quickly caught me up on some of the town’s history.
“Did you ever write about the emu?” she asked me.
“What?” I thought I’d heard her wrong, but I found out that I was a year late to one of the oddest stories out of my coverage area: An emu was sighted multiple times over the period of a week before it was captured. At the time, no one knew where it came from, and the sightings were all her students could talk about, Erin told me.
We all also bonded over a staple of any Thanksgiving weekend: football. We all agreed how devastating it was to see Bow lose to Plymouth in the Division II title game after successfully breaking into the division this year. We also agreed how incredible it was to see Claremont take down Interlakes/Moultonboro in the Division III championships, the program’s first title since 1968.
Once my status as a reporter was revealed, I could sense some unease among the other guests, but we quickly buried that awkwardness with jokes about how any goofy statement would make its way into the headline. And any remaining stiffness was exiled when we sat down to a game of Utter Nonsense, a gentler version of Cards Against Humanity, but with silly accents. Nothing dispels a sense of weirdness like talking from the perspective of a baby waiting to be fed, but in a Valley Girl accent.
“Like, just give me the nipple,” I said while idly twirling my hair.
Finally, it was time to go, and Alex and I were headed out – me to work, him to the Concord bus terminal. We were armed with all the typical mementos of Thanksgiving: piles of leftovers and the feeling that we’d left too soon. “It was so nice to meet you,” guests told me as we shrugged on our coats.
And though being the new girl was awkward, I still got to experience downtime with some friends and feel the gratefulness Friendsgiving is all about. It was enough to keep me warm as I headed back out into the cold November night.