Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade kicks off at 77th Street and Central Park West at 9am and concludes in Herald Square.

While New Yorkers have created a lot of great holiday meal traditions--that whole "Chinese food on Christmas Eve" thing was totally ours--Thanksgiving has always been sort of a hodgepodge. If New York is a melting pot of culture, we might need a little more salt when it comes to figuring out how to take the Thanksgiving meal from home and transport it here.

Or we can just give up and order a turkey from Trader Joe's.

Either way, the whole Middle Eastern-fusion TexMex Chesapeake Vegan Thanksgiving thing isn't going to cut the cranberry sauce this year. Meditate on some of these New York-inspired (or -created, or whatever) dishes and think about how you ... well, how all of us could be putting a little more effort into this whole holiday instead of annually fleeing the city and going home to mommy.

The ever-fashionable Lady Gaga, umbrella ensemble and all.

Do you hear those sleigh bells ring-a-ling too? Every year we think we’re going crazy when the radio starts playing Christmas songs the moment the organic Whole Foods turkey has turned to Thanksgiving leftovers. (It’s been especially unnerving this year, considering the temperature has us repacking our winter sweaters.) We’re happy to get an early jump on the shopping—er—giving this year, as long it means that we can stuff our stockings with toys from Lady Gaga’s workshop at Barneys. Only $95 for an Alexander McQueen shoe replica made out of chocolate? That’s less than we paid at the Met to see the reel heel!

Another holiday treat has been the silence on Wall Street. Maybe everyone made peace on Thanksgiving … you know, just like the Pilgrims and Indians did before the former wiped out the indigenous culture with smallpox. (Zuccotti Lung, anyone?) Those annoying drum-a-drum-drum circles were quickly replaced by Miley Cyrus’s YouTube remix of her song “Liberty Walk” to show her support of the protests. Listening to her high-frequency noises accompanied by images of marches and American flags was like taking a little
Salvia trip without leaving your executive suite.

If you prefer your screeching in a higher octave, please write in to Fox News and demand that pundit/non-token blond lady Megyn Kelly take us up on our offer: After describing the pepper spray used on UC Davis students as “a food product essentially,” we invited her down to our offices for a mutual Mace-off. Think of it as a modern day pie-in-the-face gag, except with more eye irritation.

Those looking for a mob scene last week didn’t have to travel to California—or Wall Street—to stand behind police barricades while shoved by strangers. You could just go to the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year’s giant Spider-Man float was either a tribute to the upcoming film, or an effigy to the Marvel gods after Turn Off the Dark made it a whole year without being shut down. Worker’s comp: it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Just like Powerball. Which at least this year, is more like a gag gift. Three Greenwich money managers just won $254 million in the lottery, proving once and for all that there is no God—or perhaps there is, and he’s just sitting in his executive suite taking a little Salvia trip. Either way, we’re just going to down some holiday spirits and enjoy ourselves.

No bikes allowed in Zuccotti (Photo via AnimalNY)

Has the Occupy Wall Street movement fizzled out? Certainly the stories have moved: While Philadelphia and Los Angeles have handed their Occupiers eviction notices (but haven't moved them out yet), and some protesters have moved down to Miami for Art Basel, we notice that it's been awfully silent over at Zuccotti Park recently.

A lot of people are speculating on what OWS can do next, or where the movement is going...which is a sure sign that journos have hit a lull on breaking news in NYC.

Maybe that's because the new restrictions Brookfield has put on the Zuccotti Park ever since the raid on September 15th make it impossible to spend any long period of time. No sleeping bags, no sleeping, no closing your eyes while standing up. And now, no bikes: Bucky Turco from AnimalNY put up a video yesterday he shot down at Zuccotti, where an officer tells him that bicycles are banned from the park because they could be used as weapons.

Deadly Chairs, Bikes Are Banned from Liberty Plaza from ANIMALnewyork.com on Vimeo.

We're not sure if this applies to camera equipment as well (which could be swung like a mace or used to hit someone like a baton, we guess), though the lack of photos coming out of the park recently seem to say so. The last photos Getty Images posted from the area were November 17th, The Day of Action.

And what about that Thanksgiving dinner we were invited to in Zuccotti? The 3,000 individually wrapped meals (due to the kitchen shutdown) didn't make for much of a party, and was scarcely covered.

While programs like OccupyYourBlock.org prepared for such eventualities as physical Occupations being shut down, there's no denying that the relative radio silence after the events earlier this month belie a dip in the movement's moral. Or maybe just the news organizations covering them.

Malkovich.

With turkey season around the corner, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the things for which we’re grateful. (Christmas/Hanukkah is better spent getting sauced, and New Year’s Eve is the time for making New Year’s resolutions with week-long expiration dates.) For those of us at The New York Observer, it’s hard to choose just what we’re the most thankful for. Is it the Occupy Wall Street movement, for providing us with a rich number of stories to cover for the past two months? Or should we be thanking Josh Schwartz & Co. over at Gossip Girl—which celebrated its 100th episode with a party at Cipriani this weekend—for introducing the nation to our very own “Power Couples” list? (To be completely honest, we’re just grateful for the season finale of How to Make It in America. Santa, if you’re reading this, all we want for Christmas is less of Lake Bell.)

If we had to make a list, at the very top would be Diane von Furstenberg: not only has the designer made it out of one terrible MTV show unscathed, but she managed to release a new scent this month as well. Perhaps Ms. Furstenberg will send Michelle Obama a free bottle of DIANE so the First Lady won’t have to admit to wearing any more copy-cat perfumes.

We’re also bowing our heads this week in deference to John Malkovich’s performance at BAM in The Infernal Comedy. Not since American Psycho have graphic descriptions of prostitute strangling sounded so très chic! We would absolutely kill for an encore performance.

We’re also thankful for The New York Times, whose Auto section has finally come around to recognizing the universally creepy “cargo van on steroids” as this season’s must-have vehicle for Manhattan’s 1 percent. Just make sure you don’t drive your $500,000 stretch-mobile into the suburbs, where your massage chairs and so-called “child’s playroom on wheels” may draw some unwanted attention in local school districts.

And since this is the season to make begrudging gestures of approval to our beloved father figures ... we are grateful for our own Mayor Bloomberg for arresting and charging alleged Washington Heights bomber Jose Pimentel before he could do any real damage. As a token of our appreciation, please accept this 24-hour drum circle at your mansion, courtesy of angry Wall Street protesters.

Last but not least, we are taking a moment of silence to honor Kathy Griffin and Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson. No, these two aren’t a new power couple; the duo recreated Janet Jackson’s infamous—and barely clad­—1994 Rolling Stone cover for Out magazine’s “Out 100” this year. Anderson Cooper, we imagine, elected to stay home to spend the entire night chewing the ice cubes in his vodka club while making voodoo dolls of Mr. Ferguson from reused papier-mâché. Don’t worry, Silver Fox! We’re already sold on the second season of your talk show!

But like any good New York parent, we refuse to pick favorites this holiday season. Instead, we’ll wait until everyone’s good and toasted on turkey tryptophan before we begin pitting Chris Hayes against former anchor Keith Olbermann at the MSNBC round-dinner-table. That’s just the kind of giving, selfless people we are.

A new study from Xobni and Harris Interactive found that 60 percent of people check their work email over the holidays, and a third of those folks will check in multiple times a day.

True, 41 percent of people said they were annoyed that they felt the need to check in with work during turkey time.

But amazingly, another 19 percent said they were relieved to have the distraction. Anything to avoid hearing Uncle Mort tell that pilgrim joke for the third time. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

If so, you're absolutely correct! New York's traffic doesn't just appear to be soul crushingly terrible - a study by traffic data hoarder NAVTEQ has found that New York has the slowest-moving, most horrendously congested traffic in the country. They announced the findings today, with Thanksgiving just around the corner.

So, unless you book it out of the city at 3:00 in the morning, a family holiday supposedly full of turkey and cheer will turn into a statistically proven nightmare. The bumper-to-bumper traffic will mar the entire weekend. Sorry about that!

And good luck if you happen to be driving to a certain city that's usually just four hours south on I-95: Washington, D.C. comes in at the second-worst city for traffic. Good luck making it down in eight hours.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Let's get cooking! >>

Here it is. (And Happy Birthday, Senator.)

We began with hot antipasti (baked clams, scampi and stuffed mushrooms) and cold antipasti (prosciutto, several kinds of salami, sardines and salads). Then, a pasta course: tortellini with cream sauce. I was full by the time the turkey arrived, along with dishes that were new to me at the time: sweet potatoes (topped, to my horror, with marshmallows), cornbread and cranberry sauce. Unfortunately, I was sitting next to the patriarch of the family. He kept heaping my plate with more and more food. Since I had been brought up with the notion that leaving food on your plate was a crime, I made quite an impression as the young English woman with a buona forchetta.

After the turkey, there was cheese, because why not? Then pumpkin pies, pecan tarts and chocolate cake, followed by slabs of hot cheesecake. By this point, I was close to tears. No sooner had we started on the cheesecake, however, than the patriarch, who was in his 80s, turned to his wife with a stricken cry.

“Maria! You forgot the stuffed artichokes!” The diners put down their forks and pushed their half-eaten plates aside. They fell upon the artichokes, which were the biggest I’d ever seen, their jumbo-size leaves overflowing with bread crumbs, chopped anchovies and a great deal of garlic. Then we went back to our dessert.

SINCE THAT DAY I’ve eaten many a Thanksgiving feast, but never one of quite such excess. I also learned that Americans find it not only acceptable but in some circles even good manners to leave some food on their dinner plates.

There was food left on the dinner plates, alas, the year I cooked a wild turkey at my house in Connecticut. A flock of wild turkeys used to parade across the garden into the woods, but one afternoon a dog ran out of the bushes and attacked one of the birds, ripping out its throat. Minutes later the owner arrived, full of apologies. Since the turkey was dead, he said, we might as well eat it.

“Think of the money you’ll save!”

He insisted on plucking the bird for me and spent the afternoon singeing turkey feathers in the backyard. It was all for naught. The bird emerged from the oven with a beautiful burnished skin, but when we tried to carve the meat, it was as tough as a rancher’s saddle.

ALSO IN CONNECTICUT, I encountered the most unusual Thanksgiving turkey I have ever seen. It was served at Arthur Miller’s house, in Litchfield County. His wife, the photographer Inge Morath, was a vegetarian. She’d lived in France, where one year, she told me, she decided to surprise American friends who were celebrating Thanksgiving in Paris. She created a turkey pièce montée, built out of fruits and vegetables. She said she got the idea from looking at composite paintings of animals and birds.

Using a couple of loaves of bread as the base, she put goose feathers in the end of one of the loaves to form the turkey’s tail. She sliced off the end of a corn cob, stuck a toothpick in it and speared it in the other end of the loaf to make the neck. The head was made from a small eggplant nailed by toothpick to the corn; the wattles were large, dried red chili peppers. Quails’ eggs made a spine, and the bird’s chest puffed up nicely as red cabbage and radicchio leaves were pinned to the bread and hung with red grapes. The eyes were made from two slices of radish with raisins in the center.

She added apples, pears, stuffed vine leaves, cherry tomatoes, kumquats, dates, figs, prunes, broccoli, pieces of cheese, black and green grapes, niçoise olives and all manner of vegetables and fruit threaded on skewers or toothpicks like little shish kebabs. With the turkey, she served a selection of dips: bagna cauda, yogurt with fresh horseradish, dill vinaigrette and curry mayonnaise. Eating this, who’d miss the real thing?

THE TROUBLE WITH real turkeys, as anyone who has roasted one knows, is that they get dry. But then a newspaper article claimed that for optimum juiciness, turkeys were best roasted at 500 degrees. The Litchfield County Fire Department had the busiest day in its history that year as smoke alarms sprang into action. Deep-frying is supposed to work—done out of doors, of course—but I’ve yet to try it.

Brining, however, is foolproof. Almost. After soaking his 20-pounder overnight in a tub of salted water, stuffing and trussing it, a friend put the bird in the oven in the morning. “You don’t even have to baste it!”

The guests arrived by late afternoon and we sat around, stomachs rumbling, trying not to fill up on cheese and crackers. After an hour, he went to take the turkey out of the oven. He returned moments later, his face in a ferment. His wife, flustered with all the preparations, had meant to turn the oven up. Instead, she’d turned it off.

 
Moira Hodgson’s memoir, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, will be published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in January.

mhodgson@observer.com.