Cranberry Sauce
I’m in charge of making cranberry sauce. A minor dish according to most
Thanksgiving aficionados, especially compared to culinary heavy hitters like turkey, stuffing, mash potatoes, and pumpkin pie. Cranberry sauce is a mere relish. A side dish. A condiment. But it is a joy to make. 
I’ve never actually cooked a turkey. The closest I got was in Mexico when we bought a live bird from a street vendor who had it tied upside down to his bicycle handlebars. We transferred the turkey to my bike and I drove it home. (Turkeys are quite placid when dangling head first from handlebars). We stored it in the back room of our house for three weeks. A kept bird. Ostensibly, to fatten it up for our Christmas feast. It lost weight instead⎯shed pounds like it was training for a marathon. On Christmas morning we took our skinny friend to the cook and bid him farewell. We were reunited later that day when we ate him for dinner.
I love the click-click of raw cranberries bouncing off each other when stirred in the pot, the popping sound they make when the heat becomes too overwhelming and they burst open, the intoxicating aroma of tart berry pulp steaming in maple syrup, cardamom, and orange juice, and the way the spoon becomes heavy in my hand as the sauce thickens and turns dark.
This year my daughter Breanna helped me make the cranberry sauce. Now she shares in the secret of why we make four times more then we need. She knows how fun it is to make, and she know when we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, we bow are heads and quietly give thanks we can have a side of turkey and stuffing with our plate of cranberry sauce.