Is your family like this at the table?
Nope. Thanksgiving is literally the only day my wife and I eat dinner at the dining room table. On every other day of the year, we take our dinner down to the theater room and eat there while watching movies.
Pretty close to that here, although TV & movie watching are probably 10% of what they once were. It’s just that my wife, her son & I have very different tastes / needs so we mostly make our own food on our own schedule. I eat almost carb-free because of diabetes, my wife abstains from different things to keep the pounds off & my stepson likes everything loaded up with hot spices.
Occasionally one of us cooks for everyone and then if it’s a big meal we might set the table. Thanksgiving would be one of those usually.
I grew up in a household where meals were at a fixed time and at the dinner table and the only grazing that happened was maybe at breakfast, but TBH I haven’t missed that structured feeding. There’s an almost totemic belief that meals are the glue that hold families together but I don’t think that’s really the case in practice. There are lots of shared experiences besides eating.
I don’t know about it being the glue, but food is important in our household. Both my wife and I are quite a bit more than averagely interested in food, and we both enjoy cooking. She is by far the better and more inventive cook that can improvise. When she is in charge, we can go for a long time without repeating any dishes. I have a much more restricted repertoire of dishes I can contribute with, and I’m not that good at improvising dishes, but I do cook whenever I feel like it, or on special request. We also think it is important to serve kids healthy food that is made from basic/fresh ingredients, and to minimise the use of ultra-processed food or ingredients. Frozen pizza and TV dinners are banned. This seems to have had a very positive impact on our kids.
Oddly the person in our house who is most into cooking – and the best at it – is our son. No matter who is cooking though we eat high quality natural foods and no junk.
I mean no disrespect for people who use mealtime as a way to bring the family together on a daily basis. There’s nothing wrong with that. Our situation is a little different – we are all living / working from home so we are cheek-to-jowl 24/7 and don’t particularly need to do synchronized eating to counteract everyone being at separate jobs and/or school activities all the time. We have rituals where we touch base and exchange conversation, etc. It has just evolved that way because it works for us.
yeah i do OK when I have exactly what the cooking instructions demand; without that I’m a disaster in the kitchen
I have reached a point in life where if it takes longer to cook it than it does to eat it I reject it for the most part.
Holidays are the best time to have relatives that can cook…just to bypass the paradigm once in a while…