I’ve cooked a turkey exactly once in my life, and that was enough to convince me that the Pilgrims owed us all an apology. No one warns you that the bird must be defrosted for roughly the same amount of time it takes to form sedimentary rock. Or that you must reach into its inner cavity—an act that feels suspiciously like a hazing ritual—just to remove a mystery pouch of “giblets,” a word that sounds harmless but is anything but.

After a day and a half of thawing, prepping, basting, roasting, re-basting, re-roasting, and existential questioning, my turkey emerged looking like it needed a wellness check. It wasn’t exactly bad, but it wasn’t exactly good, either. It was the culinary equivalent of an awkward handshake. When the meal was over, I realized two things:

1. Turkey is wildly overrated.

2. I valued my sanity—and my oven—far too much to ever do that again.

Which is why, for years, my family skipped the whole domestic Thanksgiving production and headed straight to East Ridge. East Ridge wasn’t fancy, but it had what mattered: comfort food, familiar faces, and a dining room filled with people who looked as relieved as we were not to be wrestling poultry at home. It became our Thanksgiving tradition—our culinary sanctuary.

Then East Ridge closed, and suddenly we were holiday nomads. The fourth Thursday of November became a question mark. Where do we go? Who feeds us? Who will hand us mashed potatoes without judgment?

We tried a few places, but nothing had that certain East Ridge-y combination of warmth and unpretentious charm. We didn’t want upscale or gourmet or turkey flights with “cranberry reductions.” We just wanted a spot where we could sit, breathe, and let someone else worry about whether the bird was dry.

Enter: Tusten Social.

Now, Tusten Social has a way of popping up with just the thing you didn’t know you needed—a community event here, a thoughtful gesture there, the sort of place that proves small towns don’t have to be sleepy. So when they announced they were hosting a free Thanksgiving lunch at The Blue Fox Motel, my first thought wasn’t free? It was Blue Fox? Oh, now that’s interesting.

Because the truth is, we’d go to The Blue Fox even if the meal cost approximately one arm and half a leg. It has that perfect mix of local flavor, comfort, and a sprinkle of “you can exhale now.” You walk in and immediately feel like someone took a flannel shirt, a friendly wink, and a good joke and turned it into a building.

The fact that the Thanksgiving meal is free just adds charm to the whole thing. To be clear: we’re not going because it’s free; we’re going because it feels right. It feels like the type of gathering East Ridge would approve of. It feels like community, and gratitude, and the exact opposite of stressing over an oven that may or may not cremate your entrée.

Of course, showing up empty-handed would feel wrong, so we’ll be bringing dry goods for the Narrowsburg Food Pantry. It’s the quiet math of small towns: you take a meal, you give something back, and everything stays in balance. Cans of beans, boxes of pasta, a little something that will hopefully keep someone else’s pantry from echoing. Call it gratitude in grocery form.

And honestly, that’s the real joy of Thanksgiving—not the turkey (certainly not the turkey), not the sides, not even the pie. It’s the moment when everyone in a place as small as ours seems to lean just slightly toward one another. A shared table. A warm room. The reminder that none of us are floating out here alone.

So this year, instead of roasting a bird the size of a small asteroid, I’ll be at a table at The Blue Fox Motel, enjoying food I didn’t have to cook, with people I don’t have to pretend to be fancy around. And I’ll be grateful—to Tusten Social for the idea, to the folks making it happen, to this town that always finds ways to take care of its own.

And most of all, grateful that I will never again have to reach inside a turkey for any reason whatsoever.